Brand your life story

Brand your life story with Dandelife from Tech Crunch.

Dandelife is a fascinating new “social biography network” that launched its beta this week. Users tell their life stories with text, photos, videos and time lines. Part of the business model will be to license users’ stories to corporations seeking case studies and brandable narratives. I feel very ambivalent about this.

The company is lead by Kelly Abbot of marketing firm Red Door Interactive and Edward Shenderovich, CEO of content management company Quantum Art. Dandelife’s advisory team is packed with rock starts: Ross Mayfield from SocialText, Bruce Livingstone from iStockPhoto, Jeffrey Zeldman from A List Apart, Reid Carr from Red Door and Mike Jones of Userplane. Dandelife is currently self funded and seeking angels.

The company’s leading competitor may be OurStory.com, a similar site that received $6 million in VC funding in January. OurStory founder and CEO Andy Halliday told me that his service may allow users to opt-in to anonymous aggregate studies in the future but that user generated content in their system will not be made available to marketers.

UPDATE:  from Springwise

Building on the notion that stories are best shared, Dandelife offers everyone the opportunity to write and share their personal memoirs online, one story at a time. A user's 'vanity page' shows a horizontal timeline, with events neatly placed in history, as well as photos, videos, tags and favourite stories.

Tagging is an important part of storytelling on Dandelife, allowing users to create common threads within their own stories, and connect with those of other members. Besides regular tags (relevant keywords for a camping trip could be 'camping', 'hike', and 'grizzly bear'), a user can also tag stories with the names of people involved in the story.

Being thoroughly Web 2.0, Dandelife works seamlessly with Flickr and YouTube, letting users import photos and videos to illustrate their narrative. San Diego-based Dandelife, launched two months ago, is currently in beta and free to use.

Other recent ventures in the same arena include OurStory, WikiBios, and Eternity4All (featured in Springwise in April 2006). It's all about what trendwatching.com calls life caching: collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for friends, family, or the entire world to peruse.