Many of you have asked for this feature.  Now, you're able to print your timelines, and bring it with you to show your friends, classmates, or colleagues.

Thanks for your suggestions, and keep them coming.

Have fun sharing your timelines! 

The xtimeline team

Dear xtimeline users,

The team that created xtimeline.com is proud to bring you www.famento.com, a website where you can record the history of your family, and the story of your life.

What can you do on Famento?


1. Tell your stories

Do you ever wish you knew more about your parents or grandparents?  Do you want to stay connected with friends?  Famento is a way to record your stories so that your friends and family can know you and their ancestors better.

2. Create timelines of your life

Organize your life stories, and create a timeline about your life.  Famento is a private network, so you can share this with only the people you want.

3. Share photos, videos and files

Share your photos of family gatherings, vacations, babies, weddings and other events.  Make sure important family photos can never be lost. 

4. Create an online tribute for loved ones

Remember loved ones that have passed away.  Create a profile, upload photos, and have friends and family submit their memories.  You can make this a public tribute or keep it private. 


Join us on Famento to start recording your life story and your family’s history today.  No matter how far apart you live from each other, or how busy your lives are, you can stay close to the people you care about through Famento.

The Famento team

www.famento.com  - Your Family History
www.xtimeline.com   - Timeline 2.0

We are excited to announce a new version of our timeline widget and website!

Here are the highlights:

1) A new and improved timeline widget
 
• Enhanced performance - The timeline widget loads up much faster, and can handle large numbers of events.   

• Improved embedding - It's now easier to embed the timeline widget on your blog, social networking profile, or website.  Customize the size of the widget, and then copy the embed code to start sharing timelines that you like or have created.

• Different timeline view - You can view our timeline in the traditional View or in a new "card" format.  The "card" view shows the picture and allows you to view the timeline as a continuous series of events.


2) Easier to collaborate
 
• Public Editing Option - Now you have the option to make your timelines publicly editable.  This means you can allow all xtimeline users to contribute events and edit your timelines.  With the easy wiki-like edit history feature, you can roll back to previous versions as desired.


3) Easier to discover new timelines

• Site Redesign - We have been reorganizing the site since January, and we think the new layout will make it easier for you to find interesting timelines.  We've made our Explore page the main page to find new timelines -- you can now sort by category, language, views, and time and more.   We've also simplified our home page to make it clearer. 


We're really excited about the new website, and we hope it is getting easier to create and explore timelines.  We're always working on further improvements, so let us know what you think of this new release. 

And please help us spread the word about xtimeline!

The xtimeline team

Some of our recent favorite timelines:

The History of Oil
The TV Series "Lost"
The History of the Bra

As the number of timelines on our site increases, there are more interesting timelines, but finding what you want has gotten harder.  In general you can explore timelines using:

1.       Search - enter a keyword for the timeline you’re interested in

2.       Browse - featured timelines, most viewed, most recent, etc. 

3.       Categories - six main categories

4.       Tags - keywords that are associated with the timeline

However, one thing we realized is that all of these methods above have their respective weaknesses -- most importantly they lack a human touch.  What was missing was a way for users to categorize timelines and organize the data in different ways. 

We have added two other ways for social discovery:
 1) Groups - arrange timelines based on the group’s interests or common themes
 2) Fans of - social bookmark timeline creators you like

1) Groups function - Unlike wikipedia, there are multiple copies of the same topic on xtimeline.  Sometimes these are created intentionally for an assignment, in which case creating a Group for all of them allows teachers and students to easily see each other’s timelines.  The class can also use the Group for a discussion about each student’s individual findings or about the topic they’re researching.

In other cases, Groups allows moderators and members to share timelines they like the most and that might interest other members based on their similar interests or themes. 

It's been our goal to make it easy to collaboratively create a timeline because we know creating an interesting timeline takes a lot of work.

Our attempts to make our timelines collaborative have evolved:

*  At our launch last year in July, users could allow their "friends" to edit their timelines.  However, we found that being friends on xtimeline didn't necessarily equate with wanting to grant someone editing privileges.  In fact, it almost became a disincentive to add on people you didn't know well as friends.

*  We then launched the "groups" function as a way of solving that problem.  Instead of giving all of your friends access, you could create a smaller group to edit timelines.  However, this was problematic too.  Just imagine if you had made a group on US politics and you had timelines for both George W Bush and Hillary Clinton.  Would you want the same group having editing rights to both timelines?  Imagine even if you had a group for Democrats, could you imagine the same group editing both Clinton and Obama?  If one Group manages multiple timelines, it's not clear that you would want all of the group members to have access to all of the timelines.  Groups also have other tricky internal management issues.

In the site redesign, we made two changes:

1) Edit History:   We created an "edit history" function to track the changes on your timeline.  This is similar to the history functions in most wiki-based websites.  This is important for recording past changes to your data.  You can see who made what changes, and you can quickly revert to a previous version if necessary.  We think this function is critical for any sort of collaborative editing.

2) Timeline-based Permission:  Editing permissions is now done on a per-timeline basis.  Every timeline has a unique list of people who can edit that specific timeline.  Viewers of a timeline can also send a request to the creator to become an editor of the timeline.  Now it is transparent on every timeline who made what edits. 

We hope these changes make collaboration on our site easier, more intuitive, and more transparent.  Let us know your feedback in our forums!
 

We're excited to announce some changes on the xtimeline site!  Some of you may have noticed that we've been experimenting with some changes in functionality and layout.  While we will continue to make changes and improve the site, we think it's worth explaining what has changed in this version and why.  More to come in subsequent posts.  We've also updated our Help and Tour pages to reflect these changes. 

In the end, we hope these changes will make it easier for you to create, share and discuss timelines.  (If they're not -- please let us know through the feedback button or post it in our forums!)


Thanks,

The xtimeline team

(Quick note:  We brought our forums back because it seemed like our feedback group wasn't as popular.)