Not everyone can be as obsessive about journaling as, say, a lovesick 14-year-old or Samuel Pepys, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. That’s why Narrato is so interesting.
Created by a London-based team of Wayra graduates, Narrato allows you to enter notes, take photos and describe your feelings and mood in an app that is reminiscent of a version of Path that you’d actually use.
Because the system is ostensibly private you can tell Narrato your deepest secrets and share some of your most candid photos. You can later export the data to your desktop or just go through and recall the days of your lives.
Apparently the app has gotten very popular in Japan where mobile-only journal-makers have been creating digital diaries for months. It’s available for iPhone right now and will soon be available for iPad and Android.
The system uses two ways to view your online life. There is your private journal — a system that auto-populates with the date, time, location, and weather — as well as a Life Stream page that shows the photos you’ve taken as well as tweets and other social media updates you’ve made during the day. You can bring these images and notes into the main journal and comment upon them.
The app costs $3.99 and costs $4.99 a year to maintain your journal. When you’re ready to export the journal it outputs all of your data in a JSON-compatible format along with the images and media you’ve selected. You can also create multiple journals or delete your account entirely to protect the innocent.
Will I use it? Probably not (but I’d never tell you, would I?) However, I could definitely see the draw. Because it’s not inherently social you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not. It’s simply a journal, like so many others out there, but it’s beautifully designed and quite usable.