Automatic Journaling with Social Diary, Everyday.me & Hojoki

Part of the reasons we all like to post to Twitter and Facebook is how we like to keep a record of ourselves. That can be for our own consumption or it can be to talk to the world. People have kept diaries since for ever, writers like Samuel Pepes who documented the time of the great fire of London and the plague. SO it is no surprise that we continue to do journalling in the form of social networking. Here a couple of apps that you can use to document your life and be active on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook at the same time.

Social Diary iOS app

 

Everyday.me, Day One and Hojoki

 

Journalling or keeping a diary

There can be a number of reasons why you might want to keep a journal or a diary. You may want to record your thoughts and the things that you do for posterity, you might even have something interesting to say. It is possible that you might keep a diary in order to keep yourself honest in terms of getting things done. It is so easy to get distracted and off-track in terms of what you had planned to, by writing down what you do each day you can keep on top of this. That is in fact the angle that I take in terms of using the application Day One.

I am using an application called OmniFocus to organise myself with regards the GTD. It is the best application out there for such a task and to some extent for me, it is more like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Just the same though, if you own a Ferrari you can also use it to drive down to the shops at the end of the road at 20 mph. OmniFocus is more of a pre-emptive strike in being organised and I follow up with the actual Day One note to write down what I would like to do for the day. This can be more of a narrative and less of a hard faced list. Then as the day progresses I can write down notes about the things that I have actually managed to complete. I can also write about problems that might have waylaid me along the way.

Social Diary, Everyday.me and Hojoki

Social Diary App

I use an application to tell me when there are applications that have become free called Appsfire. Sometimes there is a special offer and the application is free just for a day or possibly even a week. I like to try out lots of different applications so I will download these and give them a try. One of these applications was Social Diary and although I like it and find it interesting and useful, it will not be taking over from Day One. What is good about it is, that it will bring in posts that you have made on the social networks. You have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. What makes Day One a better application for me is the fact that I have the Mac application to use alongside the iOS applications for Day One. The tagging that you can do within SocialDiary is useful to help you categorise your postings and is also helpful when you’re searching.

Everyday.me is a blast from the past

Everyday me icon

I tweeted out that I was using the application Social Diary and a Twitter user came back to me with the recommendation that I look at an application called Everyday.me. I think that this is a better application than Social Diary, in fact this is the one that also has a fourth social network included, Foursquare. It also has a reminder in the form of a daily question which is sent out by email. The function that I do particularly like is the one called Blast from The Past. What’s this feature does is to pull in the social posts that you have made in the past in twitter etc and gives you a summary from one year ago, and maybe a couple of other years in the past. I quite often look at these and think ‘Goodness me, was I doing that then’.

The Everyday.me application also has good backup facilities as well as the ability to add tags to your posts. There is a section called stats and its gives you a few charts. Your mood, based upon the smileys you have used, a chart of interests which is based upon the tagged entries and there is also a pie chart to show you the frequency of your postings.

Hojoki is a similar, but then again different sort of beast

Hojoki

This application is more aimed towards collaboration and it has links into the sorts of things that app developers might use. It does also have a couple of social network connections which will be of use to us mere mortals. It will link into Evernote, Pocket, Trello and Twitter, plus a whole lot of others such as Dropbox and Skydrive, then some that I haven’t even heard of. This application also has a daily catch up and weekly stats which are sent out to you by email. Useful too, but not going to take over from Day One.