Sunday, December 18, 2011

Cowbird: In case Facebook Timeline is not enough.

Check out Cowbird. It's like Facebook, Flickr and more, all rolled into one. A diary, a journal, a storytelling visual experience. Sharing your stories with the world. Politics, human drama, riots, movements, it's all going to be on display. The future of sharing will now be promoted through this new site. For better or worse. I was a bit freaked out on the new Facebook. People who don't like changes to Facebook, get ready to complain. Facebook Timeline is now available for everyone to use. It radically changes the look of your profile page.

The biggest thing you'll notice is instead of a series of 5 little pictures across the top, you get to upload one large cover photo. Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories and a public library of human experience. But it's also more than that.

Founder Jonathan Harris wants to encourage a slower kind of storytelling. Cowbird has a rich set of tagging options (including the basics like people and places but with some more specialized ones like dedications). These are the heart of how posts on Cowbird relate to one another. For instance, instead of a stream in reverse chronological order based on the posting date, stories in Cowbird are tagged with the date of when the story happened. You can browse a timeline and find two stories next to each other even though they were written months apart because they are about the same event.

This could be a game changer for world history and bringing together causes and creative communities. It's cool. I'm sure this is just the beginning of where our Facebook lives are headed.

www.cowbird.com