A new social network, called "Proust," aims to pick up where Facebook leave off, creating intimacy between families and friends to share and preserve memories.Barry Diller's New York-based media company IAC launched the free social site, named after the 19th-century French novelist and inspired by the popular Proust Questionnaire. Users document and group their life experiences through chapters, which can be viewed as a localized map or a timeline of milestones.
The site asks more than a thousand questions to help provoke the memories, asking about one's most memorable birthday, first kiss, most beautiful place visited, among others.
"On the social Web today we share trivial stuff, but why not go deeper, especially with people you're closer to?" asks Tom Cortese, Proust's chief executive.
The memory prompts are meant as "a way to actually help you tell your story."
Proust is just the latest in a still-growing crop of social networking sites that seek to differentiate themselves from Facebook. Color, a proximity-based network that launched a few months ago, connects users automatically to others, even strangers, nearby, allowing participants at a birthday party, for example, to instantly share photos.
The rise of social media has helped connect new or long-lost friends in ways previously unimaginable, and helped people sustain their connections, even after moving on from college or a job. But competing sites mean overlapping and redundant information, not to mention extra time updating one's online identities.
Proust aims to go beyond ephemera, however. The site plans to provide users the option of buying an e-book or physical copy of their own digital scrapbook. In fact, because it currently operates free and without advertising, that's a key part of how Proust intends to make money.
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