Working with Our Story

To work with Our Story you need to go to http://www.ourstory.com/ and register. You can create your own timelines and stories or participate as a guest, collaborating on someone else's creations. Apparently you need to be at least 13 years old to be able to join in. You have to give your name and e-mail and choose a password. There are two types of member: basic or premium. To be a premium member you need to pay $49.95 per year and you get access to more features (the possibility to manage multiple privacy circles, the chance to create unlimited profiles and the access to a rich text editor and spell check).

With a basic profile you can create a timeline, add stories to it and contribute to your friends/colleagues's timelines. The tools are not difficult to use, although they could be more intuitive and flexible. The layout is rigid and we couldn't find any possibility to change the timeline timing, for example, which could be useful since the video runs a bit fast.

You can add text, photos and video to your story but you cannot add audio files, which could be an interesting feature. On the other hand, it's very easy to upload, add or discard pictures and video.

You can decide who can watch your timeline: everyone, you or your connections. You are also given the possibility to print your stories in a book or archive them on a DVD, provided that you pay for them, of course. You also have the chance to send a story as a postcard.

To help users organize the information, the site provides questions sets organized by topic: "My Story", "Family Story", "Baby Story", "Life Story", "Love Story", "Group Story", "Travel Story", "Remember When?" and "Timeless".

Users can send invitations to other people and ask them questions, to encourage them to collaborate.

The search tool is not very effective. It is very slow and the information you get is not very effectively sorted out. The results are organized in terms of people (users) and stories and the search is done word by word, so you waste a lot of time looking for the correct result, among lots of other useless information.

The site includes a timeline widget export that works more or less like YouTube's: you can choose the colour and size and you get the html code to embed it into your MySpace, Blog, website, etc. To be able to do that, your timeline has to be accessible to everyone.

To practise, we tested the site with a simple biography of a famous actor: Brandon Lee.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)