Three years later, Google added a feature that showed old photos at the top of the page. In 2016, Apple added a Memories tab to its Photos app with the release of iOS 10. Notifications nudge you to revisit a photo from that day two years ago, or even seven years ago, and reshare it to your News Feed. Facebook being, of course, the most obvious and influential: In 2015 it launched On This Day, after noticing that people were often looking back at old photos and posts. Over the next several years, other popular apps started to include their own features that automatically reminded people of their digital histories. “You’d remember, like, the name of the restaurant, who you were there with, what you talked about, what you ate.” They abandoned their Craigslist-killer plans and focused on developing the concept further, into an app that would come to be called Timehop. “You could almost imagine being there,” he said to me over the phone recently. It was a simple thing, but Wegener found these back-when reminders to be “powerful little nuggets.”
Their app garnered them some recognition from Foursquare, which sent over an inflatable, remote-control shark as a prize.
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So when Foursquare held its first hackathon in February 2011, Wegener and Wong cobbled together software that would notify Foursquare users of their check-ins from one year earlier. The two built a series of add-on features for the app, cheekily dubbed Moresquare, that would send users a text if someone they knew was in their neighborhood, or if two friends they knew were in a nearby bar or restaurant. The two were also self-described fanboys of the geolocation app Foursquare, which uses your smartphone’s GPS to log your location and share it with friends. Photograph: ARTURO OLMOSĭuring roughly the same period, in New York City, a pair of entrepreneurs named Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong were busy working on a Craigslist competitor called Friendslist. This article appears in the May 2021 issue.