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Today is a little historic milestone for Timeglider on the road to sustainability.

We (cough) here at Timeglider take the attitude of the Tortoise when it comes to generating revenue and, as you know, Tortoises do reach their goals. Today, after three years online, we’re asking customers to pay for Timeglider Plus. We’ve had our first paying subscriber sign up for this “SaaS” (software as a service) business, a fellow named John from Northampton, Massachusetts — auspiciously my former stomping ground — who decided it was worth $60 to pay for lifetime access to Timeglider Plus.

Those of you who have been using the Plus features for free since they were introduced can continue until the last day of June; after that, there will be reminders and prompts to ask you to pay either pay $5 per month, billed automatically; or a one-time $60 for permanent access (This $60 price for the lifetime account will go up after July 31).

Timeglider Free will continue to be available, of course, though there will be new limitations, especially for publishing, with a limit of 1000 visits per timeline per month. So, if you’ve got a timeline on your home page or a blog entry that gets a lot of hits, you’ll need to upgrade to a Plus account.

Why do we need money? So far, this has been a “midnight oil” project by a single developer: Having at least one full-time employee (yours truly) will make a huge difference; We would like to hire another part-time or full-time developer soon. As we grow, our server is often bursting at the seams. Being able to upgrade our hosting will also raise all customer boats.

It’s also important to realize that one of TImeglider’s chief missions is to provide rich versions of our software and support to educators and to nonprofit organizations for free. In another four-to-six months, we’ll introduce a downloadable package that will allow enterprise users and schools to install a complete version of Timeglider (including the Plus tools) on their own servers. For educators, this package will be free; enterprise users will have a commercial end-user license and costs will depend on the numbers of users and consumers involved. We’re also committed to having our product exist, and to generate revenue, without any advertising of any kind, anywhere. Basically, our revenue from paying accounts will help us underwrite software that we provide for free in the nonprofit sector.

As soon as I get more magenta ink for my printer, I’ll print out our first invoice from Authorize.net and mount it on the wall.

Yes, we’re still hard at work here at Timeglider Industries, cranking out new javascript, css, and HTML on a daily basis!

Come on over to our new jQuery plugin page to see how that’s going.

Kaizen!

To those of you following this blog, it might seem as if it’s been an aeon since our last post — and since changes have been made to our application. Okay, in internet time, it has!   This being a one-man band, my hiatus has meant some stillness here for a while. My wife and I bought our first house, here in Boise back in September, and are doing major remodeling to it. (See these pictures).  In a former life, I was a cabinet/furniture maker and carpenter, so I’ve been completely, and pleasantly at times, absorbed.  We’re still living in only half of the house, with painting, flooring, and much more to do in the other half.  But now, fortunately for TimeGlider, I’ve injured my neck!

Anyhow, I appreciate everyone’s patience and continued interest in TimeGlider, and I apologize if I’ve left some of you hanging with your thoughts and questions.

I hope everyone out there is enjoying this holiday season, and has a very Happy New Year.

— Michael

For months, we’ve lived with a very minimal website. Perhaps this has lent a certain mystique to Mnemograph during this beta phase. Finally we’ve put together a more comprehensive “brochure” of our offerings, who we are, and what our mission is.

This seems to mean that we’re no longer flying under the radar, but are now beginning a more concerted effort to put ourselves on the radar.

Along with this new site, we’ve introduced (a few weeks ago) a serious upgrade of Mnemograph, one which includes our most innovative feature yet: size=importance. You can read about it a bit here. The beauty of this system is that it allows one to create a kind of “cloud” or landscape of events — the more important titles standing out in the foreground, less important events fading into a background, receding into space — and saving space, so that things don’t get horrendously stacked up when one is zoomed out.

Don’t forget to write to us about your experience with making timelines. Tell us about how you found us, why you need a timeline application, and so forth, in gushing detail. Here’s a link to our feedback page, just in case.

– MR

This month the rubber has hit the road with actual, semi-random people using the application. Every bug that emerges is both a pain in the arse and an important discovery that will improve the system.

If you are interested in being a tester for Mnemograph, you can sign up for a free beta account here.

It’s exciting to see that even though we’ve put no effort into SEO (search engine optimization), we’re top of the heap for “web-based timeline software”. Coming up on Google’s p.9 for “timeline software” isn’t so bad yet either.

The other major presence on the web for timelines is an MIT project, simply called “Timeline” which is part of a suite of ajaxy experiments called SIMILE. It’s drawn the attention of a lot of hackers because it’s pretty easy to configure with XML or JSON data. The average person would have to go to The Encyclopedia Britannica’s Timelines, which is a modification of the SIMILE project — the only one to build a decent user interface.

This CSS/Javascript/XML model has lots of advantages: it’s pretty zippy. It also has severe limitations in terms of scaling and other important interface elements. If there are too many events stacked vertically, there seems to be no way to access the events the break through the upper part of the frame. I look forward to seeing someone adopt the SIMILE project and take it farther. Many others have built Simile “mash-ups” with various data. The nicest one I’ve seen goes back into geological time.

Mnemograph is a classic greek/latin construction: “mnemo” referring to Mnemosyne, the ancient muse of memory; “graph”, as we know, from the greek graphikos, relating to written words and pictures. In ancient (Greek and other cultures’) understanding, memory was understood to be something like a river in the spirit world — a resource to which people had access in varying degrees, something we either navigated or got lost in. It was understood to be something very different from our current notion: a cellular data retrieval mechanism housed mainly in the brain. Mnemosyne was the divine personification of memory, and it was she who mediated the human relationship to this “river”.

The poets were those who were spiritually the most well connected to the muses, Mnemosyne being the mother of them all. Clearly this explained how they could so accurately remember hours and hours of stories — and what they remembered, and told, was history itself. We now call this history “myth” — history as it became condensed and fermented in thousands of years of retellings/rememberings of the epic stories. The memories of the epic poets (Homer et al.) did not belong to them: It belonged to culture. It was generally understood that poets kept the memory of the culture. There was no other “history”.

I’m interested in bridging what is considered to be “natural” memory with “mnemonic” or artificial memory (i.e. memory imposed with a kind of delibarate associative technique) — and connecting this individual capacity for memory to our enormous potential for cultural memory. Redundant collective stupidity — environmental devastation, the retardation of democracy by money, and other sad hindrances — can only be overcome if humanity perceives it for what it is, in real time. Mnemograph, I hope, will be a key tool in cultivating an accurate and accessible cultural memory.

About three years ago, I had a revelation about “search” and news archives: Why did I need to have a search term in order to view a newspaper’s online archives? I was “browsing” through the New York Times’s archives, wishing I could recall (I mean have help recalling) in a general way what had happened six months earlier. In particular, I was curious about war in Iraq and Fallujah, and wanted to see the war news in the context of other events — presidential scandals, economic news, whatever. I did a search for “Iraq” and limited the query to being between May 1 and August 31 of that year (2003), and of course hundreds of results spilled before me like a dumped can of miscellaneous screws. Despite the fact that the data was well dated, and probably “tagged” with important keywords, history, as a continuum both across the spaces of “categories” and as a continuum of time, was entirely obfuscated.

I suddenly pined for a scrolling graphic timeline that could show the events of the world on such a continuum, and with some indication (scale, color-temperature) of importance. This jones was the seed moment for creating one myself. This project eventually came to be called “mnemograph” — a graphic tool for personal/historical/cultural memory.

Three years later, Mnemograph LLC has been born, and the umpteenth iteration of a Flash/Actionscript application is nearly ready for public “beta” consumption.