Tell me your story

[balupton]

Startup idea. /cc @johnedgar

Tell me your story.

Everyone has an amazing story to give, but no one dares to ask.

Here we ask, and this is what they say.

People are listed with their featured video as the cover, they can upload other videos to fill in more of their sort or add more story as things change or more realisations are had.

The featured video is 2 minutes long and asks these questions:

• who are you, and what is your story?

Example answer: I'm Benjamin Lupton and my story is a story of love, compromise and discovery.

[johnedgar]

This reminds me of a project I liked and followed called VYou, it was an online video question/answer kinda thing, similar to ask.fm or formspring. The questions ranged from general stuff asked by the code to very user specific user generated questions.

Unfortunately they didn't quite hit their demographic right and it never really got traction, part of the reason I think being that they made the network considerably too high friction, it was extremely contrived and annoying. I always loved the idea but hated how it wasn't just simple.

I think this has the potential to see some pretty interesting applications, the trick will be understanding where this fits on the users 27 hours of web use per week, and the obvious and very important, what the user actually is. Is this something we skim quickly for 5 minutes at the bus stop or on our lunch break at work, or is this something we vest 3 hours a night into, rabbit holing and getting lost in.

Do you see this as being archival? Is it closed or open?

j.

[balupton]

is this something we vest 3 hours a night into, rabbit holing and getting lost in.

definitely that option, the appeal of watching someone else, in an incredibly non-confrontational way, in a more select or voyeur way, is kind of like the appeal of chat roulette without the bad. A way of capturing (or rather as you said archiving) the stories behind the moments when and where we get lost with one another's stories.

the appeal of telling your story is that we get to tell our story to a non judgemental crowd, a supportive crowd, and we actually get to tell it! no one ever asks sometimes for stories we're starting to forget, or dying to tell yet again.

often people say that they'd love to just meet old people and listen to their stories, but they don't have time or it is too inconvenient, so we watch youtube videos or movies instead. I see this as the rabbit hole of being able to actually connect with strangers in the same way that khan academy lets students connect better with knowledge (by taking out the confrontation) into raw convenient personable sittings.

[balupton]

This is essentially a peer 2 peer https://twitter.com/StoryCorps