The First Day of Spring − 20 March, 2007

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. It's a place now known for the Rock'n'Roll hall of fame and Lebron James. Back then it had a more dubious distinction: the city whose river caught on fire. None of us living there felt like it was a bad place to live. And as far as a place to grow up, it was filled with all of the things a kid could need: other kids, mostly. Plus baseball, soccer fields, and massive maple trees along wide winding roads that dropped huge leaves. During the winter, there were snow drifts so big we built tunnels in them and pretended we were Eskimos. I lived just behind one of those large winding streets. It was called Meadowbrook because it replaced the brook that snaked its way through what was once the meadow on the east side of the Cuyahoga River.

The brook may have become a road, but the city planners had enough sense to keep as many trees as possible. Our back yard had its share. A veritable forest. In the summers it provided a "green monster" home-run fence for our towering whiffle-ball game grand-slams. In the winter, it was a James Bond back-drop for pretend spy-hunting. In the fall, we raked the leaves into huge piles to jump in. In the spring, through our backyard-forest I imagined the distant trickle of a thawing stream. I can remember asking my parents how Meadowbrook got its name. Their answer sparked in me a desire to know more about the history of the city I called home.

Such is life; the littlest things spark the biggest memories. I'm fond of a Mark Twain quotation I keep here at work, at home and on the back of my business cards:

"An autobiography that leaves out the little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on."
Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1906

As a Dandelifer, I've been thinking of streams a lot lately. When we write our stories, often it takes the style of stream of consciousness, which is not just an expert memoirist's tool but the best way I know to get the past onto paper (as it were). But in the age of the Internet, another kind of stream suits the modest goals of auto-biographers: data streams.

Since today is the first day of spring, I thought it would be appropriate to mention a few new features here that have to do with our streams. While before you may have looked at Dandelife as a convenient way to "back-fill your blog" it will soon change to accomplish a little more. Call it a confluence of your active and passive online selves.

First, a few of you have asked for me to make auto-biography tool 'magically' write itself. That is, to find ways where you didn't actually have to write anything in order to fill in your life's details. At first I thought a wizard would do the trick - but that still takes some effort on your part. Then I thought about it some more. What I came up with was a way to 'automatigically' suck in your photos, videos, SMS messages, and music that you play into your dandelife. So you can keep posting your photos, videos, blog, twitters, and music online - Dandelife will go out and collect all of that content into an archive for you. That's just the first step. Any of the content you create on the 'net that you want to turn into a more detailed story, just click on it and we'll convert it from a "droplet" in your "stream" to a story in a jiffy. There are more cool things the streams will do, but I'll save those for the official announcement.

Second, Twitter integration. Twitter is the hottest thing on the 'net right now. I've personally been having a lot of fun twittering my friends. And soon, every time you publish a story here on Dandelife for all to see, we'll send a twitter in your behalf announcing it. And no matter if your twitter buddies are at a computer on their phones, we'll serve a page that's appropriate for that device. Neat! But that's not all, every time you twitter something while you're out and about, we'll pull those messages into dandelife. If you want to write about them in more detail when you get back home (or work) it's as easy as creating a story is today.

Third, I've added another two ways to write stories. I find that I'm often at my desk working and suddenly I think of a story I want to write, but don't have the time to really do it justice. So what I've always wanted is a way to quickly send a message to myself to do that later. So to do that in the future, you can simply IM to our jabber/gtalk robot (he's named Earl, btw) or send a quick email to the site and we'll post it for you. The robot has some cool real language capabilities too. So if you start a story with "May 2002" he knows that the story takes place in May 2002. Cool!

Last, we've gone off beta. Or will when these features go live. "Beta" is a term we (in the Web 2.0 world) use to indicate that we're constantly working on the site. Which is to say, we reserve the right to change things, but also to serve as a gentle reminder that the site is only getting better with age. I decided it was time to nix that moniker. It's overused. And I added a tag line instead:

"Thrive"

Why thrive? Because it's the best word for describing what it means to live a good life. The more I work on the site, the more I want the members here to feel like life is for the living - and that reporting it accurately should not be a chore. Life is for living. So go have fun. We'll be here when you get back.

P.S. You didn't think I'd leave you without screenshots, did you?

Enjoy!