memories, tangibility, and the nostalgia project

So I've sent out some beta information this weekend on the nostalgia project I've been working on. For some reference, it's a simple submission-based database webapp that tries to get at the idea of nostalgia and meaningful memories by asking the question: "what's something you miss?"

Chances are that a lot of the readers here already recived an email from me about it, but if you'd like to check it out over the next week as I integrate feedback and smooth the rough edges, leave me a message in the comments or email kylestudstill@gmail.com. I've limited these original invites to 100 handpicked people, but mostly because it's running off of an old iBook of mine until I move it to a real server next week. If you're here, I'd love to have you join in the fun.

Already some interesting thoughts coming in: how necessarily connected are our memories to tangible things? We've definitely developed a kind of "on the cloud, we can store anything, forever" mentality, as if this kind of archive is some ultimate human goal. Will digital memories continue to satisfy us 20 years in the future? I think in some way we'll miss the tangibility of things that represented intangible memories. Not quite sure how that will develop just yet.