New app moves old snapshots from attic to Internet

For Rudy Adler and Brett Huneycutt, the future of social networking is the past.

The co-founders of the San Francisco start-up 1000memories are trying to turn the world's smartphones into tools to digitalize the estimated 1.8 trillion fading and yellowing snapshots that people have lying around in their attics, garages and picture albums -- often among the most prized, and least seen, of people's possessions. The goal of the two friends since third grade is to add the past tense to the up-to-the-minute stream of social networks.

The company's iPhone app, called ShoeBox, allows users to photograph their old snapshots with the camera in their smartphone, upload the digital image to the Internet, and share it with anyone they choose. The same day ShoeBox launched in late October, Adler got an e-mail from an interested partner. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to impart a pep talk.

"He said that he liked the app and was excited for people to start using it to fill in their Facebook Timelines," Adler said.

Timeline is the prominent new feature on Facebook that is currently being phased in across the 850-million user social network. It's a sort of digital scrapbook that allows people to tell "the story of their lives," as Zuckerberg described it when he announced the new feature at Facebook's annual developer conference in September.

ShoeBox is one of a growing list of Timeline apps that includes San Francisco-based book-sharing service Goodreads, Menlo Park, Calif.-based travel site Gogobot and movie site Rotten Tomatoes, which Facebook says can become as important as old photos to preserve memories and tell your story.

1000memories recently updated its ShoeBox app so a user can photograph an old photo with their iPhone, upload it, and then post it directly to their Facebook Timeline, parking the image in whatever year the photo was originally snapped.