info.lifespan.dev/notes/2011/04/06/ls

ls.txt

This is the contents of a file called “ls.txt” that I wrote a long time ago.

Lifespan will be a system that allows people to collect, maintain, explore, and share an archive of events that occur during and in relation to their own lives.

As a person’s personal archive grows, it will become a powerful gateway into larger shared archives, placing public history, cultural records, and other people’s lives into a meaningful personal context. At the same time, it will serve as a source of material that helps others build out their own lifespans.

Lifespan will act as an aggregator of selected existing data sources - including photos, comments, tweets, blog posts, status updates, location traces, attention data, and calendar entries - collecting these events into a single timeline that begins at a person’s birth and ends at their death.

It will function as a central repository for everything that happens during and around a person’s life, with the long-term ambition that a lifespan could be explored as a rich, navigable record of a life.

Where existing “lifestream” systems (including Facebook and similar platforms) organise this same data as a flat, real-time feed, Lifespan will organise it around the full arc of a life. Those systems show now; Lifespan will show the long now.

People will have lifespans, but so will almost anything else. Organisations, wars, governments, relationships, objects, and ideas will all be represented as lifespans. A marriage will be a lifespan between two people. A job will be a lifespan between a person and an organisation. A war will have a lifespan, as will a school, a band, or a political administration. These lifespans will be able to overlap, nest, and run in parallel, allowing someone to see how their own life intersects with those of friends, family, institutions, and historical events.

The application will allow users to add, maintain, and explore events across any of these lifespans - human or non-human - in the past, present, or future.

It will then allow these lifespans to be compared in parallel: a person’s life alongside those of their friends and contacts, alongside public figures, alongside organisations, and alongside the unfolding history of the wider world.

Relevant historical data from public and private sources - such as archives of public bodies, Wikipedia, census records, and genealogy data - will be combined with user-contributed material to generate ongoing “on this day / this week / this period” views that are specific to each person’s own lifespan and social graph, rather than just the global calendar. These views will be designed to spark further discovery and contribution.

For example, on a given date, global historical events (such as the assassination of JFK, the election of Tony Blair, or the breaking of a land-speed record) will be shown alongside what was happening in the overlapping lifespans of people and things connected to the user.

So a day might read:

“On 11 September 2001: the Twin Towers collapsed; you were living in London and working in a school; your brother was at university studying French; your friend Tom was travelling in the United States.”

Any number of lifespans will be able to be viewed in relation to any other.

Each of those overlapping spans will itself have a beginning and an end. If you were living in London and working in a school, when did that start and finish? What came immediately before and after? Those boundaries will themselves become new anchors for exploration - just like specific dates - allowing the system to keep unfolding more of the surrounding story.