“So, what the heck is Timelines.com?”
As a new site, we are asked this question a lot, along with “Who should use Timelines.com?” and various and sundry others. So I thought I’d address these over the next few blog posts.
What is Timelines.com??
Timelines.com enables people and entities (i.e. anyone) to record, publicly share and discover history about almost anything in an event by event manner using pictures, videos, maps and descriptions. Recorded events on the site can be those that you participated in – where your photos, videos and descriptions are the primary information (see the Bolder Boulder as an example). Or the events can be those that you did not participate in – where other people’s videos, photos and descriptions are used to describe the event (see Obama’s speech to the American Medical Association as an example).
Think history by the people, for the people… or the history of us (our tag line, by the way)… or user-generated history with multiple perspectives on an event… or world history (academic and non-academic) assembled, contributed and judged by people like you… all with functionality to connect events across time, place and type of event. That’s what Timelines.com is.
Our perspective is that history (big and small) is being created every day, and the vast, vast majority of it is not recorded. And the stuff that is recorded is not done in a very cohesive or lasting way. Maybe you attended a concert, witnessed a notable event, went to your town’s summer parade, founded a company, built a house, or got married - and you wanted to record and share it. All of this is history of one sort or another. Sure, you could blog about it, post it to YouTube, put it on your Facebook or MySpace page or tweet it. These are good options for sharing very recent history immediately. But these sites do not do a great job of holding your event’s place in history or of connecting it with other events that have been chronicled by you and others. After a few days, your post is basically gone. Timelines.com provides more permanence and cohesiveness for recording your event in history, and it provides distribution for your posts. So keep writing your blog and/or posting to Facebook, and record your events on Timelines.com with links back to your posts.
“What about Wikipedia?”, you may ask. Yes, Wikipedia is a great resource that is built by a group of volunteers, but it is not built to connect events to one another through time and space. And because it is a wiki, only one perspective on an event can be ultimately published. Wikipedia also takes a very academic view of history, so you likely won’t be able to publish something on Wikipedia which is not judged to be “historically notable enough” by the curator(s) of that topic area. Timelines.com lets you recording your event in history without any screening due to “notability”, and the site provides for multiple perspectives and descriptions of the same event.
I’ll answer more questions about our site over my next few posts. I’d especially love to hear your thoughts about our site – what you like and what you think we can do better. Please feel free to drop a comment below or email us at feedback@timelines.com.
Keep contributing to “the history of us.”
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