Introducing Fabric
Available in the App Store now
Our lives are a collection of extraordinary narratives.
First, there’s the self-centered and straightforward story of yourself. It has one single protagonist who knows every part. Or more accurately, if it weren’t for the limitations of our carbon brains, you would be able to go back to any single moment in time and reminisce about not only the main parts of the plot, but also the various emotion-evoking minutia. “I can’t believe I was that kid in college so long ago” or “Man, I used to love walking through McCarren Park on my way to work in the New York spring.”
But of course, we humans are incredibly social beings and just can’t get enough of each other. Our lives are also the stories of our relationships and of every group we’ve ever been a part of.
Our caring parents, our siblings who we miss, our significant others, our aunt who babysat us, our classmates with whom we shared shenanigans, our coworkers who had our back, even our Siamese who we named Mel after Mel Gibson’s blue eyes and whose favorite foods were cucumbers and cantaloupe.
And lastly, we connect with cultures. We are part of the neighborhood we live in. We have fond memories of our trips abroad. We even use the same phrase for the time after we move into a new city as we do for the first months of marriage: our honeymoon period.
We are who we are because of our place in all these interconnected narratives.
Just a couple of decades ago, even when there was any record-keeping, it was in the form of very discrete and staged snapshots — paper photographs consisting exclusively of posed smiling faces. We’d get together years later and crack open a half dozen bulky albums — the ones that were deemed worthy of surviving our latest house move.
Some people kept paper diaries, but generally we were too focused on our future to invest in celebrating our past.
Along came a lot of revolutionary technology. Dramatically improved and shrunk cameras, practically infinite virtual storage, ubiquitous GPS data, and crucially, the rise of digital identity.
With electronic mail and calendars, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, writing our stories became part of our daily routine, yet to this day the tools for exploring those stories remain rudimentary.
We, the Fabric team, Arun and Nikolay, first developed an appreciation for the increasing ability to revisit our past when we joined Facebook in 2009, a company whose flagship product year after year redefined digital identity.
Arun, having lost his father as a teenager, immediately recognized the potential of the old Facebook wall, which at the time only showed a few recent posts. What if we were able to scroll back further? What if we could scroll all the way back? Would it be possible to find out more about his life as a child? Could there be a way for him to learn some of the stories his father never got to tell him?
Thus was born Memories, a Facebook Hackathon project that later inherited the Wall as the Timeline. And later still, with help from Nikolay and many other Facebook product team members, came Friendship Pages, where you see your shared Facebook history with a given friend, Year in Review, where you get you recount some assorted fun times, and On This Day.
Those were some great first steps, but they only scratch the surface of personal digital narratives.
Today, as an independent team, we’re releasing Fabric as the next step towards that vision. It is the product of about 3.5–4 man-years of labor from scratch, and we couldn’t be more excited to share the app and our ideas more widely.
Fabric tells that individual story that is only yours by allowing you to jump into your past at the granularity of a day and the moments, locations, and people that make it up.
Fabric also allows you to explore and relive your shared moments with a given friend, the times you visited a given business or other location, and the cities you have been in.
Fabric works by putting a few personally meaningful pieces of content in one place: your phone’s pictures, the places you visit (using publicly listed venues on foursquare), your Facebook and Instagram history.
You can connect with friends within the app as well, which will make you show up in each other’s moments when you’re physically together — and only then.
One thing we know well is that people don’t necessarily want their stories told to just anyone. That’s why Fabric is designed with the explicit non-goal of being a social network in the traditional sense. You don’t post and you don’t worry about privacy settings. The goal is not to be put in a large room and given a loudspeaker. We want it to be a space as safe as email and messaging.
John Lennon once said in a song that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Fabric helps you stay in the moment. You don’t check in and you don’t post. When it fails to figure out what is really happening — or when you feel that a different version of the preset should be remembered, you can edit the moments, places, and people that Fabric tagged.
Fabric will seek to evoke emotion, but it is a practical tool as well. A few early testers have told us they use it to keep track of the bars or restaurants they visit, to find their parked car, or to aid their memory with time-keeping tasks, such as billing their clients.
Going forward, what we hope to accomplish is to retell your stories more compelling than ever before.
The hardware and software tech to understand structure in pictures and location has been progressing rapidly. We can now reliably recognize emotions, settings, and faces in photographs, and at the same time build location-aware features that play well with the phone’s battery. Computers will soon be able to reminisce with you about a block party in your old neighborhood or the months after your child was born.
Please join our journey back in time by downloading Fabric now, revisiting the good old days — or just last weekend — and sending us your thoughts via email to feedback@echo.works, tweets at @fabric_app, or comments or messages to our Facebook page.
Arun and Nikolay
