Urge for Storytelling Keeps Growing

It seems like half of all new products I see are social networks designed to bring some group of somebodys closer together. I'll take a look at social networking sites for multimedia (One True Media) and for audio (Evoca) later this week.

Today, it's OurStory, a social network that's meant to make it easy to unleash your creative juices and tell the story of your (or somebody else's) life.

Serendipity or what? All of these sites use the same color palette and soft design (not dissimilar from Yahoo! Tech) of varying hues of blues and greens.

OurStory is a basically a structured blogging tool designed to make it easy to collect, organize, and share your thoughts. You can upload photos and pop up an onscreen tool that lets you write an entry. Photos and entries are organized using a timeline metaphor. Women, say the site's creators, are the primary users of OurStory (about 70 percent of registered users) and they use the web site to keep a diary of motherhood or document their own childhoods and those of their parents. The easiest way to use it is for each photo to have a corresponding text entry. Each time an entry is created, the author can publish it for invited friends and family to see but keep it private from others. Its got robust privacy and security.

Once a member begins telling their story they invite others to join and view or comment and add to the entries. The site can send automatic notifications each time the author has a new entry. It's a nice way for grandparents who want to know what's happening with the grandkids each day to keep in the loop and a great way for moms to take a moment to introspect on the events of the day. The author can also create coffee table-worthy photobooks: perfect bound books of pictures and entries as a gift item. Basic membership is free; premium members ($39.95 annually) get to have multiple stories (one for each member of the family) and add video.

For those who blank out when faced with an empty page to fill, OurStory includes question packs (what's your favorite food?) to kick things off. Journalers have long extolled the insights reaped from writing a few thoughts every day. Doing it on programs like OurStory bring the time-honored art out of the desk drawer recesses and into the digital age.

Worried about storing the story of your life on some company's web site? When I asked the creators what would happen to people's hard work if they went out of business, they pointed out that terms of service promise a DVD of the user's content would be mailed to them if the site were to close.