This mobile app would be a digital journal of your life

Many people like to sit back at times and shuffle through their old pictures on their cell phones. But, often they struggle to recollect the memories, experiences associated with those snapshots. A new app called Fabric, built by two former Facebook engineers- Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov, may just provide a fix for this problem.

Arun got the idea of an automated journal for one’s life when he received a printed book about his dad that was filled with stories friends had written about him in college. The book had details about trips he had taken and people he had known – things that Arun didn’t know about before.

“When I leave this world, I want to leave with a story I can tell about myself – not for everyone, but the people who care about it,” Arun says. A book like his dad’s perhaps, but digital.

Fabric, which is available now on iOS, creates your story automatically as soon as you first sign up by pulling in your photos from Facebook, Instagram, and your Camera Roll and then plots them out in a map view. On the side, a timeline appears, showing you when you took those photos.

The app also tracks things like the people you saw, the places you visited, and the recorded moments from that day, which are displayed as colorful circles you can tap on when in the journal view. You can also add your best friend to the app and it will begin tracking whenever you two hang out together.

Arun and Nickolay believe their work isn’t done yet. In the future, the goal is to allow users the ability to record anything they want to remember – whether that’s a note, a song, or anything else. In fact, they want their app to be able to answer questions like “when is the last time I saw mom?” for example.

“In the really long-term, we want to be an augmented memory solution. You want to be able to search through your brain at some point – we think that will exist. We’re trying to take the first step towards that,” Arun says.