It's been a long time coming but we've been working on a nice little add-on to Odbody help you share the things that inspire you.
Life's not just about sharing the minutae of every day life, it's about sharing the experiences and things that change you – that inspire you. So we've created a neat, (and free!) sticker system that makes it easy for you to do that. If you loved a book, a film or some music, don't just leave it on your shelf to gather dust – let it do it's work where it can be enjoyed by others and who knows, it may even inspire them, and you would have made that happen.
To find out more about how to get your free stickers – and learn more about the whole idea take a look at the 'I'm not lost' page on our website.
If you still need covincing – why not visit Seth Godin's blog about 'Emptying your library' – he's all for sharing his inspirations!
Ah, the Christmas holiday's are with us once again... the season of goodwill, peace amongst all and, lets be honest... politely catching up with your older relatives at the Christmas table.
The usual conversations seem to start out with how things have been over the last year, but as the brandy soaked Christmas pud starts to take hold and the Christmas merriment takes hold generally the conversation starts to turn to reminiscing about the 'good old days'. So why not, this year, make use of this time and start to discover the real stories of Great Aunt Ethel and Uncle George?
Simply adding a few details about their past on Odbody could end up with you rediscovering their stories and finding people that were at the same events as them. Imagine finding some of the folks your dad was in the war with, or discovering stories about the street that your mum grew up in? This isn't just finding your genealogy, it's about matching people with actual events in the past.
By adding an event on Odbody, you create an opportunity to match those events with others who were also there, the event is also indexed by search engines so they can be stumbled upon by others using Google, Bing or other search engines.
If you hadn't already heard our recent success, we've recently reunited after 50 years two people who grew up in a childrens' home, simply by one of them adding the event to Odbody.
Maybe this Christmas, you might unwrap more than just a pair of socks, you could actually rediscover the events that shaped your loved ones lives.
Want to know how to find someone through Odbody or match your events with others who were there? Read our recent blog.
We've recently reunited after 50 years two people who grew up in a childrens' home, simply by one of them adding the event to Odbody. We're obviously delighted and we want to add more success stories to our belt, we want to reunite others through their life experiences, and that's where you come in.
Have you or one of your family shared an experience with others that you've since lost touch with? We know that there's always Facebook, Reunion and Friends Reunited for old school mates, but how do you go about finding someone who lived on the same street, was in the same infantry or who shared a house with you?
Odbody offers you two ways to start the ball rolling:
1. Search for a specific person – if you know can describe the person, and give some basic details about them, like where you met and what they were like, using the Odbody person search feature you can create a search for the person. That search stays active, if the description matches any of our users they'll get an alert. If not that search stays active until you do find that person.
2. Match an event with others – If you wish to find others who were at a particular event or place, you can add that event to Odbody, again giving as much detail as possible, things like where it happened, who was there and any other detail that you can add. It's best to title the event with something recognisable like the name of the event or place. Once you've saved you can use the 'matches' button to see if there's anyone already who has recorded this event – if they have it will appear here. Don't worry if they don't, the event stays live and can be matched with anyone who joins in the future. Added to that, your event is now indexed by the search engines* and if anyone else looks for that event using a search engine they could now find you!
Events can take the form of loads of things – actual events, places, websites, you can also find out who else has been inspired by the same books as you.
You can see a list of our live person searches without logging in – however for matches to work you need to join the fun.
We're committed to collecting and preserving life's experiences, but linking them with the people who were there – now that's what really floats our boat.
*Matches and searches will only work if your event is set to public, otherwise no-one would be able to find you. We take your personal information very seriously and at anytime you can choose to change individual events or your whole profile to confidential or 'friends only'.
This is the recording of the recent BBC Radio Suffolk interview with Odbody following the success of reuniting two people half a century since they last saw each other.
For the full story, click here.
To listen to the radio interview:
We recently rolled out a whole new batch of features and improvements, including:
Some users may have noticed some downtime on Thursday of last week. A planned database change, connected to the above updates, appeared to fail and the site was taken offline for a few hours as a precaution while the cause was tracked down. In the end, nothing untoward was found and no data was lost. Thanks for your patience during this time.
We hope you enjoy the improvements - we'd love to know what you think. More really exciting features are planned for release over the Christmas period.
The Odbody Team
This is the recording of the recent BBC Radio interview with Natasha Acres and Julie Acres following the recent inspiring result.
ODBODY INTERVIEW - click to play
For the full story, click here.
Two friends who grew up in a childrens' home in Northamptonshire in the 1950s have finally been reunited through social media website, Odbody.com.
William (Billy) Collins and Julie Acres (formerly Freeman), both grew up in the NCH Evenley Hall Childrens' Home but lost touch once they left to start their own way in the world.
Both now retired, they wanted to rediscover their past and the people they knew. Julie started to use the website Odbody.com to save her life's events and began a search for some of the people she knew from the Childrens' home.
Unbeknown to Juile, around a month later, Billy started to search for others he grew up with and, when he searched on the internet for 'Evenley Hall', the search engine brought back Julie's journal on Odbody.com! 50 years since they last met, they finally made contact through the site.
The site, Odbody.com, was actually the brainchild of Julie's daughters, Miranda and Natasha. "The idea behind the site was to develop a place that can capture the events that shape people's past and match those events with others." Natasha said, "All too often social media is about the now and the immediate whereas we wanted to capture the things that really matter to people – allowing them to rediscover past experiences and treasure them for generations to come. The current main sites such as Facebook, FriendsReunited or Geni.com focus either only on current friends, your ancestors or people you went to school with, yet a person's life is made up of so much more."
Miranda added "We're even more excited by this result - not just because it's our mum, but because this wouldn't have happened without Odbody.com. Our mum and her generation wouldn't generally create a blog and, although she uses Facebook, she finds it all a bit confusing... as we're developing the site, we're constantly refining it to be 'mum-proof".
She goes on to say "As children it's amazing to get a glimpse of your mum's life: Billy sent through a photo of Evenley Hall and we got to see the place that was such a big part of mum's early years – it's truly magical to share that."
Odbody allows you to create people searches that stay active until the right result is returned. You can use it to record the events that happen to you that have made a difference. But what about privacy, a key concern with internet users? Natasha says "We've built the site to give you the control over privacy: we're aware that there are things you don't want to share but they are a big part of you, so each event can be made either confidential, shared with just your friends or public – which would then enable Google to help with any searches that you may initiate. It's important to us that users feel safe and secure - they are sharing their memories on Odbody and that's pretty precious stuff. We appreciate that and we don't take that lightly."
"We're always trying to balance the level of privacy with the possibilities that come from sharing events – although we're in our infancy, we're building a site that allows users to connect through events in time. It works in two ways, matching the title of the key event with others – if you added, for example, "The Eiffel Tower" it will match with anyone else who found the Eiffel Tower inspiring. Secondly, it collects information about the event through the details or descriptions that a user records and indexing them for search engines to find them.
It's early days but we hope our searches and matches will become refined overtime."
Going back to Billy and Julie, they've already begun contacting each other and the plans for the future are to meet up and reminisce about their time growing up. Billy says, "Hopefully, on the back of this we'll be able to find more people that we grew up with and start sharing our stories together".
Natasha and Julie were on BBC Wiltshire Radio on Tuesday 8th December. You can listen to the interview here.
SERVICE UPDATE: Bug all fixed and back up online, actually transpires it affected a minority of users and so you may not have even noticed any disruption in service.
Thanks for your patience.