Create Beautiful Timelines with timekiwi

We get to experience moments of joy, sorrow, and success multiple times in our life. Most of them are recorded as photos, videos, or written words to cherish them forever. But how coherent are they? Nine times out of ten, there isn’t a common thread connecting all your memories together. Photos are awesome but they don’t say it all. You create an online journal, but it’s too much of a chore.

Sometimes it’s not enough to just capture important moments in life, but also present them all in a meaningful way. Timelines are the easy way out. A timeline puts things into perspective and give you a bigger and better picture of what went down (in some cases, what’s going to come). timekiwi helps people to create digital timelines. Time to take it for a spin!

Overview

With timekiwi you can create a beautiful timeline of your social network updates, blogs and photos. It fetches activities from your favorite social networks and visualizes them in a timeline. timekiwi is a great way for you to remember the moments like the time when you graduated or when your kid took his/her first steps. The web app is free for personal use.

Getting Started

timekiwi lets you create an account using your existing Twitter or Facebook account in a couple of clicks. Before choosing one or the other account, you will have to understand that when you connect with either Twitter or Facebook, the app will go ahead and get your username on either of these services. This will be your username on the app. So make your choice wisely.

After a true one click sign up process, the app presents you with a cool status update page while the account is setup in the background. It just takes about a minute, but you don’t have to sit around waiting. Using the menu at the lower left corner, you can start adding more services to make your timeline more complete.

Creating a timekiwi

Since I chose to connect my Twitter account, all my tweets were displayed left and right in a timeline that spans a month for each section. I couldn’t figure out why the algorithm assigns some items to the left and some to the right but it looks really cool. However, there seems to be too much empty space between all the entries and this leads to a lot of scrolling. Some sort of slider to control the length of the timeline would make a great addition.

But thankfully, there is a Rotate option that flips the vertical timeline to a horizontal view. The horizontal view allows you to see more of your timeline, but in this view the letters are a bit too tiny.

Connecting to Other Services

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, timekiwi allows you to connect with popular social networks like Instargram, Tumblr, Foursquare and Flickr. Use the menu at the lower left corner to integrate these services in just a couple of clicks and within seconds, the data will start showing up in appropriate dates in the timeline.

Besides sharing the timeline with your Twitter and Facebook buddies, the app helps you share it in your website or blog too. Just copy and paste the embed code and you are good to go!

Exploring timekiwi

If you aren’t looking to create your own timeline, timekiwi serves as a great destination to check out the awesome timelines created by other users. You can either view entire timelines or only those with photos. Either choose a username from the tag cloud or the image collage and in a few seconds, the timeline of the user will be in front of you in its full glory. After viewing a bunch of timelines, I felt that the timelines could you some personalization to add some spice. How about some custom backgrounds to start with?

Final Thoughts

I could go on and on raving about how gorgeous the app actually is. I spent quite a few minutes poking around their page source to get some idea about their magic sauce. There are so many web apps that are gorgeous and as a matter of fact I came across two even today. But when coupled with a simplistic timeline creation process, the experience of using and creating a timekiwi is all the more enjoyable.

timekiwi isn’t just for people, companies large and small can put this app to create a digital archive that benefits everyone. Inheriting the username of the Twitter or Facebook account is a brilliant idea and should help keep things simple for developers. But this could be potentially one of those features that might end up annoying users.

I have started using timekiwi, so should you!

Share Your Thoughts!

What do you think of timekiwi? Do you think timeliness are more meaningful than having a stack of photos organized in folders – digital or otherwise?