For me, family is very important, and I was raised to always think of them first. Well, now that I have a family of my own, the term has taken on a whole new meaning. With my son growing and growing and with my family thousands of miles away, it makes it hard for me to share with them all of the funny and cute moments of his life. We have tried a couple of different avenues to make this happen. We tried to get my parents onto Facebook, but that was short lived. Then we tried to set up a website, which works decently well, but privacy was an issue.
That is why Origami was very intriguing when I first read about it. It is a platform that caters toward sharing your memories with your family members and just your family members. For the past few days I have been testing it out and I have to say I really like it and I look forward to using this with my family.
Adding Moments
Origami is made so that you can easily share things with just the people that you want. Once you get yourself set up with an account you can now start to add moments to your timeline. You can do this in one of four different ways. You can share a photo by either dragging and dropping it in or you can upload it from your computer. Then you can add a caption and decide whether or not you want to make it public to share with your social networks. Adding video is done exactly the same way and you have the same options as well.
Adding a picture to your timeline
Another way you can add moments is by what Origami calls “sharing a story.” You can jot down a fun memory or a silly moment that you want family to know about. What is cool about this, is that you can choose to use their voice to text function, where you speak into your computer’s microphone and it will dictate what you speak. I tested it out a few times and it actually worked very well and it was pretty accurate.
Writing a story to document to share with family
The last way that you can add things to your timeline is by adding picture albums. The nice part about this feature is that not only can you upload pictures from your computer, but there are a handful of services that you can connect to and get pictures from. Once you connect you can choose which pictures you want in the album and then add it to your timeline.
Adding a photo album
Interacting With Family and Friends
What distinguishes Origami from other platforms is that you get to choose who sees your posts. You get to invite family and friends to view and interact with the things that you put up on your site. They can comment on different moments and there is even a “love” button, which is Origami’s version of the “like” button. Other than that, there is not much else that they can do, which is perfectly fine because the site is not meant to be a huge social sharing site, but one where you can share family moments with the people that are close to you.
Commenting on posts
Pricing
Origami takes an interesting approach to their service where they charge $5/month or $50/year to use the service. They give you the first 30 days free and then after that if you decide you don’t want to use the service, your family and friends can no longer access your site. They are taking the “all or nothing” approach, which I am not the hugest fan of. I don’t mind the price as I believe it is a fair price for the features that you get, but at least give people more than one option. Origami’s belief is that if you are spending money for your site the more you will care about it. That is true, so it will be interesting to see how this will work.
Pricing for Origami
Final Thoughts
I think the big question that looms over Origami’s head is will their approach to recording memories and sharing it with a small group of people work? I am not so sure that it will and I have my doubts. I love the service and it is really well done and very easy to use. I like that I can share with only the people that I want to share with and I like that once I start paying for the service I can get unlimited storage as well as my own domain name. There is a lot to like about Origami and its features, so why am I so skeptical on its success? I think the biggest reason is that it is somewhat late to the game and it doesn’t offer mind blowing features that could convince the masses. You already have sites like Facebook and Tumblr as well as a handful of others that can do what they are doing for free and they have been at it for way longer, so they have built up a huge following. What sets Origami apart is the privacy factor and they are going to have to try and capitalize on that to convince people to join.
Overall, I felt it was a great app to use and I really liked it. They also have an iPhone app that has a lot of the same features, but gives you the mobility to add moments to your timeline. If you are looking for a way to share life moments with your family and close friends, this may be one to check out.
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