Introducing Bokeh, a Mobile Lifeblogging App for Saving and Sharing Moments
If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you may have noticed that our news editor DL Cade has been running the show as of late. Here’s the reason: for the past 3-4 months, I’ve been hard at work building a new website and service — one that we’re finally revealing to the world today.
It’s called Bokeh, and is a mobile lifeblogging service that lets you save and share all of life’s little moments through an easy-to-use app and easy-to-browse website.
If you’ve ever tried maintaining a daily blog of your life, you may have found — as I did — that it can be quite a hassle. It takes time to sit down, transfer/process/upload photos, write some text, and then publish. If you want to do this on a daily basis, it can quickly burn you out.
Social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it very easy to post text and photos, but those services are geared toward broadcasting. What if you don’t want every little moment to show up in someone else’s news feed?
Private journaling apps and services make it easy to remember the days of your life, but generally they’re completely private — there’s no way for family and friends to drop by and follow along with your life.
Bokeh fits in between those two types of services. It’s as easy to use as Facebook/Twitter/Instagram for documenting your life, but it’s designed to be more for remembering than broadcasting. Sign up, and you’ll have your own Bokeh blog found at yourusername.bokeh.com.
You can find my personal bokeh at michael.bokeh.com (sorry, my life is pretty quiet and ordinary compared to some people I know).
As you can see, the website is organized by date, allowing you to quickly jump into any date in the past to revisit it. There’s a month view that offers an at-a-glance look at things you did that month:
Go up a level to the year view, and you see 365 days of your life on each page:
You create moments live on the app using your phone, and they’re automatically synced to your Bokeh blog. We designed the app to be extremely streamlined in its posting process. To create a new text or photo moment, just tap the pencil or camera button at the bottom, write some text and/or snap a photo, and then save it.
You control how public or private your Bokeh blog is. By default, blogs are public — anyone with your URL can stop by and browse through your moments. If you want to make it a private service, simply go into your settings in the app and add a password for your website (this is different from your account password).
Keep this password to yourself to make Bokeh a private journaling service, or give out this password to family and friends to allow them to follow along.
Bokeh is 100% free and unlimited. You can save as many moments as you want to document your days, and we’ll never charge you a cent!
If you want to get started, head on over to Bokeh.com, or download the app directly from the iTunes App Store (an Android version is in development). It’s open registration for now, but we’re planning to put up a waitlist in two weeks.
