MEMs
A social network prototype exploring how shared memories, experiences and passions could connect people.
2020
What it does
- Explore how memories connect through the people, places and interests they have in common.
- Browse a personal collection through views of events, people and places.
- Try a prototype interface for describing a memory with a date, image and associated details.
- Explore music, films, television and games as part of the story around a memory.
The challenge
I wanted to build a different kind of social network, connecting people through shared experiences, memories and passions. MEMs was my first experiment with graph networks. Inspired by the connections in the human brain, I wanted relationships between memories to reinforce and strengthen over time. I prototyped with my own life: photos, media I had consumed, people I knew and things that had happened to me. The ambition was to turn that personal history into connections with other people.
What I learned
Trying to capture a whole life and build a social network around it was a huge undertaking, and I eventually ran out of steam. This was before coding agents, so I was learning as I went and building everything step by step. I think I would have got much further with tools like Claude Code, although the ambition of the project would still have needed careful limits.
Built with
- React
- Apollo
- GraphQL
- Neo4j
- Material UI