'StoryWorth' Records Family Memories to Connect Generations

Camille Bautista2013-04-10 21:58:24 UTC

The art of storytelling is timeless. There's nothing like hearing old tales of your grandparent's teenage days — but the narrative connection often loses its spark when Grandma lives across the country and you can only keep in touch through Facebook.

To help collect family history and create deeper relationships between generations, Nick Baum created StoryWorth, an online platform that archives personal stories, both spoken and written. The goal is to bridge family gaps and encourage dialogue by prompting questions you may not regularly ask.

You can share your own memory or invite loved ones to tell theirs. "What were your friends like in high school?" "How did you figure out how to be a parent?" Baum sends users one question per week, and participants can respond via email or phone.

Baum's 82-year-old father inspired him to create the service in order to share stories with his kids and grandchildren.

"He was born before computers, before television, before transatlantic flights, he has a lot of cool stories and I wanted to make sure I would give him an easy way to capture them," Baum tells Mashable.

Though StoryWorth will provide weekly questions, users can make up their own. For older users who prefer not to answer via email, the service sends a phone call to the storyteller who can record their memory, similar to leaving a voicemail. Answers are stored privately to an online biography and can be shared with select family members or friends.

Storyworth is available as a subscription service for $49 a year, and users can invite as many people as they want. Over time, the goal is the discover a broader sense of what that person's life was like.

Responses can be arranged on a timeline, indicating certain chapters or milestones, and users can also download the answers in formatted PDF files to print as keepsakes.

"I think people don’t often take the time to ask these questions of their family, and as one of my users put it, the StoryWorth email is the most important one he gets every week," Baum says. "Almost all emails don't matter a week or a month later. What can be more important than your family history?"

Would you use StoryWorth? Are there other apps or websites you use to collect family memories? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, JoelMontes

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Facebook Home Ad Encourages Phone Use During Family Dinners

Seth Fiegerman2013-04-15 15:00:45 UTC

Facebook Home can make spending time in your real home a little less boring — at least that's the suggestion in a new ad for the product.

Facebook's latest video for Home shows a young woman checking her friends' status updates on her phone to escape the "dull" conversation her family is having at the dinner table. Each update she sees on the phone comes to life around her — one friend pounds away at the drums in the corner of the room, another group of friends have a snowball fight around the table — drowning out the real-world conversation in the process.

The social network has used this formula in several ads now to promote Home, an Android launcher that centers the smartphone experience around friends rather than apps. In one video, an airline passenger checks Home to entertain himself while waiting for takeoff; in another video, a Facebook employee turns to Home to drown out the sound of his boss Mark Zuckerberg talking.

While the videos are clearly intended to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, some have started to question whether Facebook should be encouraging people to use their phones in situations where it would be considered inappropriate, like during an office meeting or a family dinner. The dinner ad in particular received some harsh words from a writer at Forbes. "This ad simply showed someone blowing off her real-world relatives for her more exciting friends doing more exciting things," he said. "In other words, Facebook Home makes it a whole lot easier to be rude to your family and in-the-flesh friends."

Do you think Facebook is setting a bad example with these ads, or are people just making a fuss about nothing? Share in the comments.

Image courtesy of YouTube, theofficialfacebook

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