I ran into an old article from the NYTimes:

Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 — and he’s now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of “People I’ve Known in My Lifetime” (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). “It’s a way of helping me remember the past,” he said by e-mail.

I can’t help but think about the relevance of this to the HICSS paper that Fernanda and i’ve been working on. We realized that the power of our email visualizations was in part due to their power to operate as an artifact for storytelling, to provide a prop for one’s memory. In effect, the visualization serves as a tabulation of email relations. I have to wonder what it would mean to be such a Connector that one would do this.

Of course, it also reminds me of friends of mine who take pictures every day as records and other systematic means of marking time, place and people. Of course, the irony of Patrick’s system is that the public archive is tapped into search engines and thus helpful to a wider range of folks.

Everyone I Know

Patrick Coston has been keeping lists of everyone he knows since he was 16 — and he’s now 39. Several years ago he consolidated his paper lists into one online file, making public a tabulation of “People I’ve Known in My Lifetime” (patcoston.com/home/people.htm). “It’s a way of helping me remember the past,” he said by e-mail.

Mr. Coston’s catalogue, which lists more than 650 people, is just one example of a seeming trendlet; I easily found another half-dozen sites with similar lists. Although some are created purely as a personal exercise (one list maker cited the need to say thanks), other people hope it will help them renew contact with lost friends and relatives. The idea is that you will find the list if you plug your name into a search engine like Google and will then contact the site’s creator.

Indeed, Mr. Coston’s page has become a sort of search hub. Not only has the page put him back in touch with at least 50 former acquaintances, but it has even helped complete strangers make contact with people listed there.

Similarly, Andrew Baio maintains a “Lost Friends” page (waxy.org/lost) that has in just one year reconnected him with five people. Unlike Mr. Coston (whose site lists every movie he has seen), he is not a compulsive cataloger. He had simply become frustrated with the difficulty of finding people online.

“As everyone from your past comes online, there needs to be better ways to find people,” he said. “Pay sites like Classmates.com are useful but limiting, and there doesn’t seem to be a popular free alternative. Until then, my ‘Lost Friends’ page will stick around.”