By Dani Fankhauser2013-05-03 15:30:18 UTCOne morning you might wake up, roll over, grab your phone and flip through the pictures from last night, from yesterday. "Was it really that great of a time?" you ask, and you've got a stream of photos to help you answer, the ones you want to delete from memory and the ones you'll frame on the wall, or at least post to Facebook.
An iOS app released Friday called Days, built by TechStars company Wander, aims to replace your phone's camera roll, with a twist: Instead of deciding which photos to share, you'll decide which to remove (but photos are also saved to your phone, so you don't lose them completely). The photos you share will be grouped into a 24-hour set, from 5 a.m. to 5 a.m. on your local time zone, what founder and CEO Jeremy Fisher calls "the folk definition of what a day is."
The hope, Fisher says, is to capture a narrative by plotting these pictures in a group, to make a place for those photos that would not make sense on their own. You can't cheat: You can only add photos you've taken inside the app, and they will be timestamped.
Before public release, the app was used in a beta of fewer than 100 users.
"Big users are parents with young kids," Fisher says.
"Big users are parents with young kids," Fisher says.
The reason Days will be appealing to new parents, vacationers and people with mundane lives alike is that the day is a great normalizer. No matter how many photos are taken (on someone's too-awesome trip to Spain), each person you follow can share just once per day, which addresses oversharing and activity stream hijacking unlike any other social app.
Your friends (and mom) don't need to have Days to see your photos — you can share a day via text message, email, or post to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. Privacy controls are standard — your account is either public or private, but you can still share to social networks from a private account if you'd like to share selectively.
One of the best features of Days was created by accident. When you look at a Day, you might see that some photos behave as GIFs, a theme present in recent apps including Vine and Cinemagram.
But the decision to loop photos was to cut down on the volume — that thing where you take a bunch of photos in a row trying to catch the whole family without anyone blinking, or the dog in the air capturing the frisbee. The feature was meant to save you from having to delete duplicates, but turned out to capture movement through still photos (although if you'd like you can "split" the animation).
Days is designed to make documenting your life a habit.
Days is designed to make documenting your life a habit. Fisher, a who says he is a longtime fan of National Geographic, says he wants to empower people to see the world through others' eyes, as photojournalism does, but the app helps regular people document daily life.
Of course, Days' visual diary might bring to mind the potential of the camera on Google Glass. Fisher confirms the company will be building for Glass.
The decision to design for a 24-hour day was far from arbitrary. Fisher notes that phone numbers are seven digits because seven is a magic number for human memory. A text message was 160 characters because researchers found, amidst bandwidth limitations, it was sufficient space to communicate most thoughts (and the length of a tweet was inherited from text messages). The day is already a unit we use to organize memories.
The company, which has raised a $1.2 million investment, had an focus on location earlier in its beta. Founders are Fisher and Keenan Cummings, creative director, and the team includes two engineers and a operations and community manager.
Image courtesy of mikebaird
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