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p/eternalistThe world's first self-writing journal.
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Aaron Yih

Eternalist - Turn your digital footprint into a self-writing journal

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Eternalist is a web app for people who are afraid to forget the intricate details of their lives. It acts like a personal biographer, pulling in data from apps that you already use and assembling that data into your own private timeline of memories.

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Aaron Yih
Maker
šŸ‘‹Hello Product Hunters! My name is Aaron and Iā€™m super excited to finally launch Eternalist on Product Hunt! I just graduated and am currently putting off finding a job in order to work on this product as a part of the Startup UCLA accelerator 2019 batch. We started working on this problem because we were disturbed by how much of our lives we simply forget. If you don't think this is a problem, try to think back 3 days ago. Can you remember what you did on that day? Who you met? What you ate? I certainly can't, and this scares me. I tried to think back over each day of the last year, and about 95% of my year was just completely gone to me. I was only able to recall the superficially memorable events like trips, which means that I lost almost all of the mundane but meaningful memoriesā€”like the night I played video games with my best buds till 3 in the morning. Traditionally, people use journals or scrapbooks to remember their lives, but those both take an incredible amount of time to maintain. Hats off to people who can do it, but most of us are mere mortals. We created eternalist to make sure that everyoneā€”even super busy peopleā€”have a way to take a step back and appreciate all that they've seen, done, and experienced in their lives. Thanks for checking out what we're working on! Happy building šŸ˜Šand have a great weekend! __________________________________ Any feedback would be appreciated! We would especially like to know what you think about the layout of the data. We know that we need to improve it, but we're not sure what's not working about it now. šŸ»
Calum Webb
Hey Aaron! This looks really interesting and something I'd definitely consider using because I'm obsessed with tracking my days looking back on my photos and Google location data! šŸ™Œ How does it work with the sourcing of all of the content? Say, are photos from Google Photos etc. still hosted on those sites, or are they imported to Eternalist?
Aaron Yih
Maker
Hi @calum! Yes, thanks for asking about that. I should have mentioned more about how we actually store stuff! At the moment, we just store the information that each of the APIs returns. That means for photos and videos we keep a copy of the url that the API returns and are NOT keeping a copies of the actual media in our database. The data is also transport encrypted. šŸ”’ As a side note, google photos is a special case because they change the base url every hour. To reduce our API calls and avoid hitting the limit, we fetch new data once when you first sign up and once a day after that. We only get the up-to-date base urls when you request certain photos (ie when you look at your timeline). We'd actually love more feedback on this! It seems like users prefer that we store their data this way, but in the future, we may have to start storing photos to offset storage costs and or to avoid API limits. What do you think? We're really open-minded to different ways to do this!
Aaron Yih
Maker
UPDATE: We are aware of an issue with API limits. Unfortunately, due to higher than expected volumes of traffic, we already hit the Google Photos API limit for today. You can still create an account and add your photos, but they won't show up until tomorrow! šŸ˜¢Please don't let that discourage you from trying it out! We're working on a patch that will be released tonight to boost our API limit, but if anyone can help us get that limit raised, that would be šŸ”„
Aaron Yih
Maker
The error should be patched now, and everything should be working as expected! Please let me know if you're having trouble with it!
Tim Connors
Absolutely love it. Thereā€™s really nothing else like it out there. Canā€™t wait to see what features are coming down the road. I vote for some kind if map visualization!
Aaron Yih
Maker
@tim_connors Thanks Tim! We're definitely working on getting geolocation data in here. A map viz would be cool too! I'm thinking sort of like google timeline
Ryan Jacobs
Looks good!
Rashid Aziz
This is super cool! Really interested in using it, but concerned about security. How is all this data stored? How can I be sure it's safe to use, especially if it has access to location, financial, and personal data?
Aaron Yih
Maker
@rashidaziz Hi Rashid, thanks for expressing your concerns. It is something that a few other people have mentioned, so I definitely plan to update the landing page with more detailed information about this. At the moment, we just store the information that each of the APIs returns. That means for photos and videos we keep a copy of the url that the API returns and are NOT keeping a copies of the actual media in our database. The data is also transport encrypted. šŸ”’ We use postgres and Digital Ocean. We're thinking about building a decentralized version of eternalist that would make it even more secure and allow you to choose where your data lives. Would you vote for a move towards that direction?
Rashid Aziz
@aaron_yih1 yes, that would be incredible! Even a self-hosted version would be awesome. :)
James Vaughan
This is awesome Aaron! I've been thinking about trying to make something exactly like this for a while, but now I don't have to ;) My main feedback so far is: - Security and privacy are super important to me, and I'd appreciate more assurances on the landing page or during the onboarding flow that my data will be kept secure and private. - More integrations! The integrations you have so far are awesome and I'm looking forward to having more. - Calendars. I'd especially like a more flexible Calendar integration. If you can make it use iCal/CalDAV links rather than a Google Calendar login, it will work with any modern calendar product (including Google Calendar). That will make non-Google Calendar users like myself very happy. - Music. I'd really like a Last.fm integration as an alternative to Spotify. I listen on a bunch of different platforms, including Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and YouTube. Last.fm is an awesome way for me to have a centralized and complete listening history that is not platform-specific. Being able to integrate my Last.fm account with Eternalist would provide a much more complete picture of my listening history. - Podcasts. I'd also like to have a record of Podcasts I've listened to in something like this. Calendars and music both have platform agnostic options (like iCal/CalDAV and Last.fm) but unfortunately I'm not aware of anything like that for podcasts since it's just RSS feeds and each podcast browser/player has their own way of handling things. - Movies. I love using Letterboxd to track the movies that I watch and it would be great to have that history included in Eternalist. (https://letterboxd.com/jamesbvau...) Thanks for making this!
Aaron Yih
Maker
@jamesontheline Hi James, thank so much for such great feedback and suggestions for integrations. We'll definitely add these to the top of the list. I too wish that there was a better solution for podcasts. I even tried listening to podcasts inside Spotify to have them show up in my timeline, but the Spotify API excludes podcast listens in the recently played endpoint šŸ˜¢ Many people have mentioned that they would like more communication about the security, so before our next big release, we'll definitely update the landing page. I'd also love to chat more with you about what we're planing to do to keep users' data safe (We're planning an entire overhaul of the backend/database system). In the mean time, you can reference some of the answers that I gave to above questions or check out the legal stuff in our terms of service (https://eternalist.io/terms-of-s...) and privacy policy (https://eternalist.io/privacy-po...)
Ignacio Herreros
Whatā€™s your privacy policy? Any plan on launching in the EU and comply GDPR? Thanks
Aaron Yih
Maker
@iherreros You can check out our privacy policy at this link: https://eternalist.io/privacy-po... We're at such an early stage and still testing the adoption of this product, so many aspects of the product are still subject to change. We are starting conversations with privacy lawyers and will pursue GDPR compliance once we are more certain of the final form of the product, however we have done our best to be transparent about the way we use the data.
Chris Dancy
Feels like memolane
Aaron Yih
Maker
@chrisdancy1 yaaaas it is like memolane. I think we're shifting towards a more interactive experience though. We discovered that when the user doesn't have to do anything, they're not invested in the product. It was a prime example of the Betty Crocker case study...we just need to find our egg.