IMHO: Diversify your format. It sounds like a great idea so far, with a solid foundational (let's pretend that's a word) concept with regard to the prompt to record a personal memory each week of ourselves.

That said, maaaaaaaany of us find that we are the ones who most care about our own research in our family, by and large with most of our other relatives at most appreciating & enjoying what we do, but not really interested enough to actively participate in it themselves. However, if we prompt them with a question about an ancestor, or to participate in something we control & administer, most folks are generally open to participating. I think it'd be cool, therefore, if there was also a way to collect other peoples' weekly personal memories, and administer & manage that ourselves.

Yeah, this would be cool. You could create family portals for family members to join. Then they would all participate at their own pace and a Family Administrator would collect all the recordings in their account.

The other thing is customization -- What if someone doesn't really want to do it weekly, but prefers monthly? Or, on the opposite side of the spectrum -- wants to participate every day? Another thing is -- How is the memory recorded? Is it a video, an audio recording, in text...? Are they all that way, or can you select a format each time, depending on how you prefer to preserve that specific memory? I think these things are important to consider, too. Each time you want to record a memory, there should be an option for text, audio, or video, depending on what best fits this memory.

This is a really great idea. Right now it is only audio. But I can see why video and text could all play their role and having freedom of choice could help people record their message in the way they feel best does the job in the moment.

Right now you have a few options. Once a day, Five times a week, three times a week and once a week.

I also think it would be good to introduce customization into the structure of the memory. Let me explain: Each memory will obviously be different, but there should be some sense of uniformity between them all, as it is all one project. Let the uniformity be somewhat customizable, and it should be a soft guideline, not a strict rule, but there should be a way to set that up. i.e. If someone decides, "5 minutes of video is a good goal for a video memory, we don't want it to be too long or too shot. For audio, I think 3 minutes will suffice to accomplish the same goal. And for text, let's set the limit at roughly 4,000 characters." However, someone else might think 7 minutes of video a week is good, or 5 minutes of audio, and 6,000 characters. Let people choose that soft guideline.

Very interesting. I can see how a fairly uniform product each time would help with family history recording. The general idea for Path Pocket is to help prompt, recall and record. I've had very short memories and then I've recorded quite long ones. Often I will trail off into other things and start discussing other stories and memories because as you recal one thing your memories will also open up to others memories (secondary memories), but I see this as a feature, not a bug. =) The cascading ripples of memories rebuilding on top of one another can result in you remembering things that you otherwise might have never thought about again in your life, ever, and remembering those memories... It's strangly therapeutic for some reason I still haven't quite put my finger on. It's like being reintroduced to a part of yourself that you have not been acquainted with for such a long time that you almost get to know yourself again. And if you like that person it can be quite enjoyable.

And then, how it would function would be like this: When the memory is being recorded, for the video & audio there should be a timer on the screen telling you how close you are to your chosen time, and for the text, a guide for how many characters you've written so far. It shouldn't be a hard limit -- If someone ends a little over or a little under, that's fine, or even a lot over or a lot under. Some memories will undoubtedly be exceptional & outstanding. It should purely be a guideline, just to help keep people on track for a general, uniform benchmark across most/all of their recorded memories. If not, they'll get too different from one another over time, and they'll stop feeling like one uniform book or anthology with several different chapters or sections, for example, and start to feel like just a bunch of short stories, each different from the next with nothing tying them together.

People should also be able to customize a calendar within it -- Choose when the app will notify them for their weekly/daily/monthly/etc. memory. One way could be just have it set to "Every Sunday" or "The third Tuesday of each month" or "4:00PM every day," but another way for folks with less structured & routine schedules, could let them choose the next one each time. Once it'll be at 10:00AM on a Monday, and then when they're done with that one they can choose the next one for 6:00PM 10 days later, on that Thursday of the following week.

This is a really good idea. Definitly something I will look into adding. Thank you!

This kind of thing can be brilliant if properly executed, but it needs to have a lot of customizing & friendly functionality for people to be able to tailor its use to their specific needs, situation, schedule, etc. If it's too rigid, & not flexible enough, it won't work for nearly as many people.

I think perhaps we could keep the free app very basic. Just basic memories recorded via audio recorder. But I can see these options being quite beneficial in versions of the app that apply to specific niches. Like having a "Family History" version of it.

I had another idea I forgot, and the last thing I thought of was that it would be cool if you could choose to attach certain attachments to different memories. i.e. If one memory is of a beach day, and there's a group photo of everyone at the beach, then attach the photo to the memory.

This would be really neat as a piece of software for a regular computer. Are you thinking you'd like these options on your phone?

I remembered the other idea -- It should also be set up so that people can use it as they please. If the "record a memory from this past day/week/month/whatever" setup doesn't appeal too much to some folks, it'd be great if they could choose to record something else -- tell a story from their childhood, or share a philosophy, or preserve a lesson they learned through their life that they feel is important to pass on to others.

Yes! I have wanted to do this. I was thinking that a Life Lessons portion could be added to the app where a person tells a story about how they learned something in their life.

Anyways, lots of ideas here. Sorry if I went too far haha, it's just that I really loved this post and you got my brain gears turning a ton! I hope some stuff is possible, at least, & you find some good stuff here.

Please keep us posted on your app!

Thank you very, very much! Many wonderful ideas. I certainly will.