A whirlwind trip to Manhattan. An exciting job offer. An exhausting hunt for a shoebox-sized apartment in San Francisco. I remember the big events of summer 2012, but the little moments get lost in the shuffle. An iOS app called Timehop reminds you of your life's milestones while also retracing Friday night check-ins at your favorite bar or tweets about the show you're binge-watching on Netflix—things you would otherwise forget.
Timehop is the scrapbook we can't be bothered to begin. The app, which began in 2011 at a Foursquare hackathon, collects your updates from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Flickr, and even Dropbox to remind you daily of brunch check-ins, wedding shenanigans, and that photo you took that day your niece was looking extra adorable.
You can sync your computer's photos to Timehop with the Sync client for Mac or Windows.
But it's more than just a digital photo album. It's easy to write off apps like Timehop or Facebook's "On This Day" feature, which resurfaces milestones from your life and your friends' lives, too—as just fun little timewasters. A social media archive we can easily comb through, and maybe even learn from, could be more valuable than our drunken Foursquare check-ins and silly Facebook photos would have you believe.
An app is born
Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong developed Timehop as a daily email digest of Foursquare check-ins called FourSquareAnd7YearsAgo. The pair envisioned the service as a social media version of Mario Kart's Ghosts—instead of seeing transparent drivers racking up high scores, you would instead see a version of yourself checking into places. You could watch yourself gallivanting around town a year ago, and remember the fun times you had back then.
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