Experience Graph

Researchers have found that we tend to retrieve memories in two ways - by people and by experiences. Sometimes you think about a person you were with first and then about what you were doing with them, and other times you think of what you were doing first and then remember who you were with.

Many social websites and services today organize content around people first and experience second, resulting in a friend graph.

Friend graphs are certainly very powerful, but there are times when it would be more efficient to find all the content for a specific event or experience by organizing around the experience instead of navigating among all the friends who were there.

At Erly, we believe there is an interesting opportunity to help everyone organize their personal content around experiences, creating an experience graph.

In a friend graph, to find some piece of content, we must first remember which friend shared it, then try to find that content among all the social websites and services that friend uses. But in an experience graph, people and their content are organized around the experience that connected them. If you can remember the experience, you can find all the content associated with it.

Organizing content by experience is a more natural way to group many types of content because humans tend to remember their lives as a series of experiences, grouped into different periods of life.

The experience graph has other benefits. Since each experience includes several dimensions (who, what, when, where), you can quickly browse along any of those to find other experiences you might be interested in.

You can quickly browse experiences by date and time, which can be useful for finding an experience, remembering a past trip, or figuring out what comes next, as in a calendar or planner.

You can also quickly find experiences organized by person. You can browse your own, or those that your friends have made available for you to see. You can even look for experiences that you shared with one or more people.

It’s also easy enough to browse experiences by geography. You might be searching for what’s happening in your neighborhood this weekend, or searching for things to do on an upcoming vacation to Italy, or trying to remember all experiences you had at the house you lived in when you grew up.

And of course, you can search and browse for specific experiences or groups of experiences directly. Show me all upcoming games from my favorite football team. Find all my past outings to the coffee shop down the street from my house.

Experiences can create ancillary benefits. Often, experiences group a set of people that we want to communicate or interact with either before, during, and after the experience.

People typically interact with experiences differently depending on whether the experience occurs in the past, in the present, or in the future. For past experiences, people usually want to remember, retrieve, and share. For current experiences, people need to communicate, coordinate, and record. And for future experiences, people want to discover and plan.

At Erly our goal is to build products and services that help you interact with the your experience graph across all of these time frames, whether it’s helping you to find, discover, plan, organize, share, or remember.