Memolane: Highlight Social Content With New Embed Features And WordPress Plugin

Memolane, a startup that helps users archive and explore their content across social networks, has been working to make it easier to share that content, for example by allowing users to share “lanes” with their Facebook friends. Now, founder Eric Lagier says publishers, brands, and anyone else should have an easy time featuring that content on their own websites, through an improved embed feature and WordPress plugin.

When someone signs up for Memolane, they connect the social network accounts of their choice, then the site creates a single timeline highlighting the content from all of those accounts. (One of the more fun features, though less relevant for this article, is the fact that Memolane sends you emails reminding you what you were doing a few months or a year ago.) You can also create lanes around specific events or topics by filtering based on tags or dates.

That means a lane can be a nice representation of your entire online presence, or of all the content you’ve created around something more specific. Since that’s the case, it’d be nice to showcase that lane on your own site, rather than having to point everyone to Memolane itself.

In fact, Lagier tells me that Memolane has been beta testing an embed feature since August 2011. Based on user feedback, he says the company has created a streamlined embed flow, which should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s embedded content from a site like YouTube — you just hit the “embed” button, adjust any settings that you want, and copy the code. Memolane has also added deep linking, meaning that if you click on, say, a tweet or a YouTube video, the content opens up inside the embedded lane, rather than directing you to another site.

There’s also a new plugin for WordPress users.

As examples of what people are doing with the embed feature, Lagier pointed to a band called Iration, which is using Memolane to showcase all the content from its tour, and to a charity called BuildOn, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and using Memolane to share its history. I’ve also embedded a TechCrunch-related lane below.