During the past two months, our team has spent a lot of time together. Most of our time together, in fact. Working, for the most part, and eating (which is really important to us). Like many people today, we snap a lot of photos, fire off status updates, check in at restaurants we visit for team meals.

But with every day that passes, it becomes harder to track down that exact photo, or remember when it was exactly that we reached a particular milestone, or visited a particular restaurant. Usually it involves trying to remember who captured the content, and then trying to find which service they published it to, and then digging back through that service to track down the content.

The story of how we started Erly and our fun and intense first months together is one of many experiences we want to capture, and while it’s easier than ever to produce content around these experiences, it’s still too difficult to organize in a usable way. A variety of services have made it easier than ever for us to organize all the people in our lives, but too many of our pictures, stories, and digital memories continue to be buried in hard drives, emails, and feeds.

This is first of many problems we want to tackle at Erly, where our mission is to build a series of linked products and services to help you find, discover, plan, organize, share, and remember your life’s experiences. We plan to do that by having all of our products and services build off of what we’re calling the experience graph. In contrast to a friend graph, of which there are many great examples already and which organizes all content by the people you know, the experience graph aims to organize content and connect people through their shared experiences.

To that end, today we’re launching our first product: Collections. We built Collections to give groups of people a simple, beautiful way to gather and share all the content from their experiences. Collections are collaborative albums that can hold all types of content, from photos to text, to videos, to webpage links.

When you sign up for Erly, you’ll find a sample Collection. In it, we’ve shared a bit of our company history so you can see how you can use Collections. Each Collection is a permanent home for an experience. They need not be as momentous as starting a company. As we’ve played with Collections, we’ve found ourselves building Collections for everything from a team dinner (we like to eat) and past vacations to business articles that have guided us in building our startup or online videos that we pass around to each other when we need a laugh.

You can learn more about Collections and Erly and sign up for a free account at Erly.com. We’d love to hear your thoughts and requests at feedback@erly.com or @erlyco on Twitter or www.facebook.com/erly. And stay tuned for more updates to Collections and new products coming soon; our plan is to release early and often.

Thanks!

Team Erly
feedback@erly.com

P.S.: If our mission interests you and you happen to be a great developer or designer, drop us a note at jobs@erly.com. We’re still looking for a few good people to join us in the Bay Area or New York City.

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