When I was working in Paris I got to know a friend of mine (Frederic Crochet) who proposed me this idea. At the beginning of 2006 my friend had a wonderful idea: "everybody is trying to sort images, videos, messages on maps. But nobody does it on a time line".
There're lots of prototypes of timeline application available. The most significant of them is the open source MIT Simile project. But today I would like to talk about two of timeline services:
- ourstory.com, which, from my point of view, was the most elaborated solution back in 2006
- xtimeline.com, recently launched in Shanghai (China) in July 2007 and with the ambition to become the Wikipedia of timelines
One of my business ideas I wanted to propose in this blog for my start-up was precisely my friend's idea about timelines. But since I discovered xtimeline.com I really think it is very difficult to do something better tham this Shanghai company.
Coming back to the myth of the great idea (from the blog "I will teach you to be rich"), which I already discussed here, what is really important is not the idea itself but how you implement the idea.
Ourstory
Ourstory was created in 2005 but I have to say that it has not been very successful yet. Why not? well, Ourstory is a service I would never use because of the approach they implemented the idea.
- The site is complicate to use: the are timelines, FAQs, blog-like tools, photo sharing tools. You never know where you need to click. The user who wants to make a timeline does not really care about all that staff.
- The site is focused on family stories (marriage, children, buy a house...). This is really a market niche and probably a very boring topic for most netizens.
Xtimeline
The story of Xtimeline is just amazing. The site has just been launched 3 weeks ago and has already got much more attention in the blogosphere than Oustory.com. I really believe that Xtimeline is going to be a very big thing so let's pay attention to it. Why? because the approach of their idea: the Wikipedia for history buffs
- Their site is attractive, organized and simple to use.
- Their content is much more universal than family stories (Oustrory) and is very interesting:
- As I said their aspiration is to become a real wikipedia of timelines and I believe they will manage to do it.
Read more about Xtimeline on China Web 2.0 review
Their gadget is a bit big to fit on a blog. I hope they will change it soon (they just launched 3 weeks ago). So, I just post a picture.
