MemoryMountain Tells Your Story

SAN FRANCISCO (06/13/2000) - We all deserve to tell our life stories. And if you want to preserve the tale for generations, where else but on the Internet?

That's the theory behind MemoryMountain.com, a Web site launching this week.

There, you can document your life through photos, videos, and text, and share your creations with as many or as few people as you wish.

"People think of their lives as stories, and MemoryMountain ensures that their lives will live on for future generations," says Keith Ablow, the site's cofounder. Ablow, a Boston-based psychiatrist, says the idea for the site came out of his frustration with the limited choices people have to tell their life stories.

The free service is advertising supported, and it comes with 10MB of storage space. Additional space is available in 10MB increments for fees starting at $1.95, and it is available in packages with and without advertising.

Choose Your Showcase

MemoryMountain is divided into three main sections: a Life Center, where you can post photos, text, and videos; a Tribute Center, designed for online memorials; and a Civilization Center, which offers a collection of historical events arranged on a time line.

The service is designed to be easy to use but sophisticated. You can create libraries to store your photos and images, which you upload from your PC. Then, you use these images to create a series of activities in your Life Center.

MemoryMountain offers layout templates for each of your creations, and you can modify the font, size, and colors with just a few clicks.

Once you create an activity in your Life Center, you can view it on an interactive time line along with the other activities you create. You can also populate this time line with historical events from the Civilization Center.

For example, in the Tribute Center you could create a time line for your grandfather and use the interactive time line features to compare the milestones in your life to his.

MemoryMountain is launching the Civilization Center with 3000 events, and it plans to add more. The events cover a wide range of topics--from Nixon's resignation to the debut of the first credit card.

The interactivity that the time lines provide is one of the best things about MemoryMountain. It makes this service more fun and more compelling to use than simply building a personal Web site through a service such as Tripod or Geocities.

Once you have created any of your Centers on MemoryMountain, you can choose to password-protect your material so that only your designated users view it. You can create Guest Lists for inviting others to view your creations.

Worried that MemoryMountain's service is a little morbid? The people at MemoryMountain think of their service as a way to celebrate life. And your life story is as lighthearted as you make it.

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