<story><title>Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time</title><url>http://www.good.is/post/chat-history/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called a &quot;word processor&quot;&lt;p&gt;When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a &quot;life processor&quot; that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after death, to somehow more actively participate than we&apos;ve ever done before.&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one), and spread all over the place. After all, they&apos;re &lt;i&gt;my&lt;/i&gt; thoughts. Shouldn&apos;t my descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of data to start with.&lt;p&gt;I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.</text></comment>
<story><title>Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time</title><url>http://www.good.is/post/chat-history/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>stevenp</author><text>I&apos;m glad to know that I&apos;m not the only one who keeps all that stuff. A few months ago I went back through some old chat logs to find the first time that I chatted with my best friend, and it was a lot of fun to relive that part of my life.&lt;p&gt;I think people don&apos;t realize that the volume of digital artifacts we&apos;re creating is going to be staggering when we look back at them a century from now. That&apos;s one of the reasons I like to check in places. I imagine what it would have been like if my grandfather had traveled the world with Foursquare in the 1930s -- maybe I&apos;d be able to visit the pubs where he drank in Copenhagen, or the port he arrived at when he met my grandmother in Glasgow.&lt;p&gt;My life might not be that exciting, but I&apos;m definitely leaving a trail behind. My grandchildren will wonder why I checked in so much at the Palo Alto Creamery. :)</text></comment>