Inventor of Facebook Timeline Launches App That Auto-Logs Personal Digital Footprints

A blog post published today by Y Combinator features a story about one notable alum of its current class: an iOS app called Fabric that pieces together users’ past activities and locations from postings on a range of social media platforms.

Arun Vijayvergiya, one of Fabric’s two co-founders, is a former Facebook engineer who built the prototype of the social network giant’s Timeline feature, according to reports from TechCrunch. Facebook’s Timeline allows users to maintain a record of their activities by highlighting significant events from the past in chronological order; Fabric goes a step further, automating the process by pulling together all historical postings, from posts and pictures to videos, and organizing them in a location-based, time-stamped map view.

According to the company’s founders, Fabric is also unique in its ability to synchronize disparate moments that social media users record on different platforms. “Facebook isn’t really complete,” explained Fabric’s co-founder Nikolay Valtchanov, also a former Facebook engineer. “You have a lot of information that you’ve captured in different apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, but it’s fragmented.”

Fabric is able to weave these separate posts together and present users with comprehensive records of their experiences. Commented Tim Brady, partner at Y Combinator, “Arun and Nikolay are passionate about using the latest technologies to capture and journal the stories of your life.”

In addition to capturing social media postings, the startup also aims to document other digital detritus from people’s lives, such as Uber receipts and Starbucks purchase histories. “The amount of information a single person creates has really exploded over the past few years,” said Valtchanov. “In the future there has to be a product that will synthesize all of this information — we just want to be the first ones to build it.”