

Please check out our side project, OhLife (from MeetingMix, YC S08) - sgupta
http://ohlife.com/

======
aw3c2
Quick first glance feedback on the page, take it or leave it:

a) "the easiest way to" lowercase start and then "Write your life story"
uppercase start. Seems weird to me. The other way around or both uppercase.

b) Top bar seems empty, maybe an actual logo (that adds some other
color/shade) would chance that.

c) "See an example" needs no-Javascript fallback. I assumed a video behind it.
Pleasant surprise to see something that finally showed me what it is all
about. I strongly suggest not hiding that. It is below the break for me and
adds a lot.

d) Ned Flanders takes away the credibility and earnesty the page build up so
far. Bad!

e) "private, secure, & friendlier", the comma after secure seems out of place
to me. I am not an english native but from what I know it would be more normal
without it. "friendlier" is not a word, is it? Also, how is it secure if you
do not tell me how you actually secure it (both for normalos and hackers
please)...?

f) entry is a bad empty word. I guess you already tried to find a better one.
Can't think of one myself. :-(

g) "a personal journal that you'll love to use" = you love the journal

"why you'll love us" = you love the company

h) "Oh snap, remember this?" same as Ned, does not fit the otherwise very
noble theme at all.

i) The open book has a weird shape. Does not feel right to me. Maybe if it was
taller?

x) No privacy policy (as a techie "only you can see your entries" screams for
encryption against YOU (and/or hackers, this is important)), no contact, no
nothing to make it human.

y) Privacy tainted by Google Analytics.

~~~
ugh
Re: e) (This is purely my personal opinion, but …) Anyone who uses the serial
comma [1] must be seriously insane. How can you? Doesn’t your brain explode?
(Calm down, calm down … [2] … there, better.)

Friendlier is indeed a word, the comparative of friendly.

Amazing idea, by the way, beautifully executed and immediately captured my
imagination.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g>

------
adammichaelc
I notice that a huge part of my daily life is recorded in email conversations
with other people -- it would be cool if I could forward a conversation to
post@ohlife.com and it would automatically make it a part of my journal and
make it aesthetically pleasing at the same time.

Great job on the execution of this app. I have talked to others who have had
this same idea, but their execution was ugly/unexcting/etc. This is clean and
simple.

~~~
jbail
Taking your thought a step further, let's also save the comments you make on
others' blogs and bring them into your journal/blog as well.

At the end of the day, I don't need another blog or a slight variation on
blogging technology. I need something that basically blogs for me. If I can
add value to my site by adding comments like this one to other people's sites
(then pressing this "magic" button (maybe a bookmarket?) to automatically save
it as part of my blog), that'd be pure awesomeness.

Beyond saving boatloads of time for everyone who used it, it would create a
more connected blogosphere by allowing people to link their commenter accounts
(like HN, Reddit, etc) to their primary blog...effectively giving people more
ownership over the things they write on others blogs, increasing author
recognition, etc.

~~~
Lewisham
_I need something that basically blogs for me._

Tumblr is pretty close to doing this, but the problem is its just context-free
noise. It's echoes from a very, very noisy set of interactions that you
perform. I had a Tumblr blog that harvested photos, blog posts, Twitter,
last.fm etc etc. and it all meant absolutely nothing.

This isn't really blogging, it's journaling. Writing a diary is supposed to be
therapeutic because you're writing down the things you dare not talk about
with others (maybe not even your SO). It's not about what you do, it's about
how you feel.

That's why I would like to see encryption mentioned somewhere, and pushed
hard. I wrote one entry to see how it works, but I'm going to disable the
notifications until I know that my personal outpourings are not actually being
read by others.

------
sgupta
Hey HN - we made this in our spare time, just because it was something we
wanted to use. When we told some friends about the idea though they wanted to
use it too, so we decided to release it. Many thanks for checking it out.

~~~
evandavid
I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to
use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of
business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal
to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily
prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software.

~~~
evandavid
That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than
willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to
seeing where this idea goes.

------
pesco
Accept PGP-encrypted mail seamlessly and you won't need a privacy policy
except for those who like throwing their lifelog at random strangers. Be sure
to use PGP/MIME to include the old message in your mailing.

Of course, setting up PGP, let alone remembering the passphrase (gasp) is a
lot to ask of the typical user who needs to use his mail client as a text
editor.

Otherwise, it's a cute idea, really. Please excuse cynicism.

------
ryanwaggoner
The design is beautiful, but why would I use this over WriteRoom? For years
now, I've been writing at least 500 words in WriteRoom every single weekday,
and I'm closing in on a year of doing it (and a bunch of other habits) without
missing a single day. It's not that hard, I know I'll probably never lose my
entries (time machine + dropbox backups), and my privacy is more assured. I'm
just not sure I see the advantage here...

~~~
Terry_B
Writeroom + timemachine + dropbox. I don't think you're the target market :)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Touché. Can't believe I didn't stop to think about this :)

------
iampims
No privacy policy is a no go for me.

~~~
KevinMS
I have never read a privacy policy, EVER. Am I missing something good?

If they violate their own privacy policy do I have legal recourse?

And is it even possible to write a privacy policy without loopholes?

------
mrduncan
First of all, fantastic design!

Is there any way to export posts - for example, if I wanted to share them with
a significant other or another family member?

Also, and this is mainly curiosity, how do you handle sending posts from the
past for the first few days where there really isn't much history?

~~~
sgupta
Thank you!

We don't have export yet, but we've definitely wanted to share some of our
entries with close friends and family too. We'll be brainstorming around this!

Regarding past history: For your first week, we just send you your entry from
the previous day. After you've been using it for a week though, and some
history has built up, we'll show you entries from a week ago (and then a month
ago, etc.).

Thanks for checking it out - really appreciate it!

------
thingie
It'd be nice to have some export feature. After few months, if I will use
this, you are going to have quite a lot of entries from me, and all of them
are important to me, I don't want to lose them, so I'd like to be able to
easily make backups to my own computer.

------
jasongullickson
Pardon my French but; fucking beautiful.

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vessenes
I like it, and I signed up. I don't want to get emailed at 8pm -- that's after
my internet cutoff, so I faked a timezone. But, it would be nice to just
choose a time.

Also, who did your webdesign? I like it!

~~~
sgupta
We'll be adding the ability to change when the email is sent, and it should be
out by next week. Clever workaround though!

And thanks for the design compliment! We did it all in-house, so we really
appreciate the kind words.

------
pclark
This is really cool. I'm curious if _you_ can read the entries?

~~~
sgupta
Thanks for the kind words! We're currently working on encrypting the entries -
this is an MVP and we initially wanted to see if people like the idea.

~~~
martey
It does say on the home page that "Only you can see your entries." If they are
not currently encrypted, that would seem to be untrue.

~~~
colonelxc
Even if they do encrypt it, they will have to be able to decrypt them server
side to send you your month old posts. That means the owners are technically
capable of also reading all of your posts.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
That's not entirely true. If this were purely a web-accessible blog, there's
no reason you couldn't encrypt/decrypt this in the client (sending and storing
encrypted text). You'd have to throw out email posting in that case though.

~~~
andreyf
I think you're on to something. I look forward to the day when we are shocked
by unencrypted private data accessible on the server as we do un-hashed
passwords.

~~~
dublinclontarf
There are a number of online password stores where all the information is only
decrypted on the client. Nothing new, just not widespread. Can't remember the
name.

------
hooande
OhLife is one of the few apps that I use every day. If you've ever tried to
keep a journal or any kind of organized daily log, I highly recommend it.

------
mdolon
I'm going to try to call this one now: my gut instinct says this will be a
huge success. Hopefully I remember to check back a few months down the line to
see how my prediction faired.

Great work guys!

Edit: I just noticed lists I email don't get formatted correctly. It's
slightly annoying for such an otherwise beautifully designed layout.

------
ajcronk
There is a typo in the url at the end of the How did your day go? email.
Should be ohlife.com/today, not ohlife.come/today

~~~
sgupta
Thanks for the heads up!

------
a3_nm
How exactly is this service better than, say, a simple text file on my own
machine with a daily reminder set up through some other means?

Why would I want to use some third-party website for something so simple that
I might as well do it myself? I can see some pretty annoying downsides (need
to have a crypto layer because I don't want you to be able to read my journal,
need to export regularly the data to my own computer because I don't want you
to be able to lose my journal), but no real advantages (it's not even more
convenient!).

In any case, I believe that the two following statements, at least, are plain
wrong:

\- "The easiest way to write your life story": no, the easiest way is to fire
up a text editor and start writing.

\- "Only you can see your entries": should read "Only you and us can see your
entries".

------
d0m
I'm not really sure I would use this. However, I really love the website
design.. It's so clean. The colors are nice. The forms are simple. Maybe a
little video would be nice on the frontpage.

------
blitzo
You wanna drop that ned flander out, not everyone know him

------
proexploit
I like it. Many times I've wanted to start a journal, just to record memories,
but I detest writing. This makes it feel easy. We'll see how it goes.

------
pesco
In reaction to the fact that I adore the idea despite the fundamental privacy
problem (see earlier comment), here is my spin on the theme in the form of two
really simple Unix shell scripts. :)

<http://www.khjk.org/log/2010/jul/journal.html>

Thank you for the inspiration!

------
cvg
Really like the simplicity of the idea and clean look of the site. Already
replied to the welcome message - waiting for it to post to the site.

I like the daily emails as I don't visit too many sites daily, apart from HN
and Gmail. This will be an easy way to log all that I'm up to. I'm not sure
how regularly I'll do this, but time will tell.

------
fizzfur
great now I have des'ray in my head.

interesting idea... I'll give it a go for a while until someone realises I
email myself everyday. Does it get angry if I don't reply?

mini feedback on home page: The 'see example' link needs to scroll the page
down for me, I didn't spot the page grow and was waiting for it to load.

------
yequalsx
I think the vertical spacing between the various components is too much. If
you could move things up a bit it would work real well. The colors, fonts, and
graphics are very soothing and welcoming. I just didn't expect to scroll down
so much.

------
techietim
I know your homepage says that all your posts are private, however, adding a
privacy policy page which outlines that in legal speak would probably be good
idea.

Otherwise, this looks great, and I'm looking forward to using it!

~~~
alttab
Yes, please! Tell me in no uncertain terms you will not give away, sell, or
crawl my data.

I will then use it as a personal journal for work purposes. Perfect for
filling out during the morning with a cup of coffee.

------
Glide
Love the design. I just signed up. Can't wait to see how well it'll help me
keep a journal.

One thing I noticed: on the login page can you make pressing tab in the login
box go directly to the password input box?

------
cheesey
Pleasing, private posterous?

~~~
sami_b
That is what I was also thinking. You could do that on Posterous with privacy
on, you can also attach files to the email.

------
dublinclontarf
"Once you have a few entries here, we recommend printing them out, sitting by
a fireplace, and reading them in Morgan Freeman’s voice: "

Like a twinkie, like a twinkie.

------
Tichy
Ok, nice enough, but why would I mail my private thoughts to the cloud?
Writing a small script that mails a random email by me to myself should be
easy enough.

------
yeti
Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life
(tracking a new fitness program)

Thanks guys

------
chamza
Love the idea. Good work fellas

------
faramarz
Very cool. Does that mean YC has a vested interest in your side project?

------
someone_here
May I ask how this is different from, say, private wordpress.com blogs?

~~~
pclark
I think they clearly articulate this on the home page

