The amount of data that will get accumulated over the course of a person’s life will be huge. So the team experimented with chopping that all up into specific years. A Facebook hackathon project called Memories, for example, which was accidentally released to the user base briefly last year, did that very thing. Users navigated between various buckets of content by clicking on years.
But that didn’t achieve the effect Facebook wanted. That’s not how we remember our life, Felton says. We don’t remember it in chunks. We remember it as a stream. ‘I felt strongly that your life should be shown in one long continuum,’ Felton says.
“Designers Behind Facebook’s Timeline: 5 Keys to Creating a UI With Soul.”
The stream metaphor works really well to craft narratives, which is what Facebook is trying to have us do. Per Walter Benjamin, I believe the opposite: “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
(via marathonpacks)
Weirdly enough earlier in the piece they acknowledge that people DO remember things in chunks - or at least in discrete images and moments - but this didn’t lead to a very workable or flowing UI.
I think Facebook have memory wrong here - from my limited understanding of the current thinking in brain science memory is a process of re-inscription not recall in any case - but I also think the cleverness is precisely that: like Eric says, the stream works for narrative, and we like the IDEA of memory as narrative. Timeline isn’t really an attempt to mirror how memory works, but to build something that works how we’d like memory to.
