The man who can't forget takes another photograph of his visitor. It's instantly filed away with thousands of other snapshots capturing breakfasts, workspaces, room numbers and faces that he may or may not ever meet again. Then he lowers his phone and returns to the conversation.
"On a really boring day, I'll probably take 25 to 30 photos. On a really active day, it could be 100 or 150," he says, before repeating part of his mantra again: "I take photos of every person I meet, everything I do." At least when it comes to taking pictures of the people he meets, he likes to show a little restraint. "I usually leave that until the end [of a meeting] when the person has warmed up to me and it's not super creepy."
For more than five years, Lee Hoffman has catalogued every detail of his life with a singleminded determination that would impress narcissists and obsessive compulsives alike. He tries to keep records of every place he visits, every person he meets, every meal he consumes, every emotion he feels and every thought or idea that crosses his mind. Hoffman records these with photos and daily summaries that he writes out each morning in the default Notes app on his iPhone, all to guarantee that nothing is ever forgotten.
See also: Man vs. Algorithm: When Media Companies Need a Human Touch
Like many eccentric life choices, Hoffman's curating impulse can be traced back to his attempts to court a girl. When the project started, he had found himself at the "very rocky beginning" of a romantic relationship with someone he would end up dating for years, and the drama took its toll on him.
"It was an emotionally turbulent time. I was so immersed in it for months that it became my way of life," he says. "I wanted to sanity-check myself." In his first journal entry, added to a spreadsheet on his desktop, Hoffman noted that his online chats with his girlfriend seemed "a little distant," which made him feel insecure. Next to the post, which was just a couple of lines long, Hoffman added the notation "H4.5," indicating that his mood was slightly worse than normal.
He had never kept any sort of log before this, or even been the type to take pictures — though he always considered himself analytical by nature — but he soon felt awed and at times steadied by all the details he could reference from the past. While his romance eventually ended, his love affair with recording his life continued. Hoffman, now 32, has amassed so much data on himself that he can quite literally relive the past and, he argues, make sense of the present. Now he's working to help others do the same.

Most people may not consider themselves to be as fanatical as Hoffman about recording their lives, but we do track a tremendous amount of information — it's just that the default is usually to focus on sharing it on social networks or through messages rather than organizing it for ourselves. In mid-September, Hoffman launched Memoir, an application for iOS and OS X, which puts the focus back on using all of this information to tell the story of our lives.
Memoir organizes a vast amount of personal details — smartphone photos, Foursquare check-ins, Facebook updates, Instagram posts and tweets — into an easily searchable catalog and resurfaces your older posts at relevant moments. When you walk into a restaurant, the app might pull up a previous entry reminding you of the last time you were there. If you search for a friend within the app, it will display all the pictures he or she took when you were in the same place at the same time based on the metadata, regardless of whether you were tagged. While ringing in the New Year, you might get a push notification reminding you of how you celebrated one, two or three years earlier.
"People don't think about things in terms of Instagram photos and check-ins; they think of something as, 'I was at this place and this is what I saw,'" Hoffman says. "We are making sense of what's going on to play it back to you and fill in the pieces."
In short, he hopes to turn our data into memories and those memories into more meaningful reference points for our day-to-day lives.
Diary apps have been around since the early days of Apple's App Store. For the first few years, most simply tried to create a digital version of the traditional pen-and-paper journaling experience: open up a blank page, type in text, repeat. Over time, another crop of startups emerged with an emphasis on organizing the posts people share on social networks rather than prompting users to sit down and start typing, "Dear diary..."
Some refer to these apps as passive journals, or journals that write themselves. Others bristle at referring to them as "journals" or "diaries" because of the analog associations it may conjure up. Yet, the list of apps in this latter category reads like a thesaurus selection for the word "diary": Everyday.me, Timehop, Momento, Saga and more. Like Memoir, these apps attempt to create a more definitive digital lifelog by bringing the information we scatter across networks under one roof. In recent months, this second group of apps has received an increasing amount of interest from investors and other tech companies.
Memoir announced raising $1.2 million in September from a host of prominent investors, including Betaworks and Lerer Ventures, and now has "many hundreds of thousands" of users. HeyDay, a similar app with more emphasis on photo layouts founded by two former Zynga employees, raised $2 million a couple months later from Google Ventures and Spark Capital, and announced raising an additional $3.5 million Series A round earlier this month. Timehop, one of the first services to surface memories from social networks, raised another $3 million in funding in July, bringing its total funding to more than $4 million. Earlier in the year, Memolane was acquired by an anonymous company based in Silicon Valley and we've heard it will relaunch later in 2014.
While 2013 proved to be the year that services like Snapchat found success focusing on the ephemeral, these life-tracking apps gained traction by emphasizing the opposite. Yet, the two app categories may be succeeding for some of the same reasons.
"I think we are related to that rise of ephemeral apps in a strange way," Alex Le, cofounder of HeyDay, said in an interview. "We are both sort of reactions to Instashame and all the side effects of living in this super social world." Nearly 10 years after Facebook launched and provided a platform to broadcast to the world, more and more users appear to be looking for private services, whether it be messaging a select group of friends or recording something for yourself first.
Hoffman believes that the two categories are similar for a more fundamental reason: both are benefitting from the ubiquity of smartphones and improvements to the cameras that come on these devices. "I think they are two [sides] of the same coin," he says, "in the sense that they are both facilitated by the fact that everybody has a camera phone and everyone feels comfortable snapping pictures really easily."
The relatively recent phenomenon of most people owning smartphones and using it to capture and share details about their lives is part of the reason why more money is flowing into this space, according to multiple investors we spoke with.
"It's taken a few years for people to make the behavioral shift where they are capturing so much content that it is lost on their camera roll," said Brian Pokorny, former CEO of DailyBooth and current managing partner of SV Angel, which invested in both Memoir and HeyDay. "The market that takes pictures once a day is massive. I think the people that want to relive these moments will be bigger as it becomes a known opportunity."

Even founders of more traditional journaling startups who don't fully agree with the approach of apps like Memoir and HeyDay find themselves moving in this direction in reaction to the deluge of data.
In the suburbs of Salt Lake City, far from the tech hubs in New York and San Francisco, Paul Mayne and a small team of developers built what is arguably the most well-known journaling app: DayOne. It has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times since it launched on iOS nearly three years ago, thanks in part to being one of 10 paid apps that Apple highlighted last July to celebrate the App Store's fifth anniversary.
If they didn't compete with one another, Mayne and Hoffman might be considered kindred spirits. Ever since he was 5 years old, Mayne has held on to ticket stubs from all the movies and sports games he attended. He tried repeatedly over the years to keep a proper journal, but not unlike Hoffman, he preferred to "keep things in the raw data format" instead. With DayOne, he keeps track of his ideas, vacations, work meetings and outings with friends. But one key difference between the two founders is that Mayne is willing to let some details go. That philosophy extends to the app.
"Our focus is about writing and proactively contributing to your journal, not letting your photo stream or other streams automate your journal so much that it becomes backup or storage," Mayne told Mashable in an interview last month. "It's overwhelming to try to make sense of that much data when you are trying to capture a memory."
Though Mayne doesn't want to sacrifice the experience of actively curating entries, he admits his startup is interested in "automating things" more. One option, he says, is that users might potentially see a feed of their data from other services and then choose which details they want to keep in their DayOne timeline and which they have no interest in remembering. "I would like to have it built in a way where the user could pick any type of data that's relevant to them," he says.
Right now, DayOne offers the option to incorporate data from sources like weather reports, motion detectors and music playing on the device that the user is journaling from, but that may just be the beginning.

Oliver Waters, cofounder of Momento, one of the first journaling apps to incorporates posts from additional platforms, says that its users have an average of 1,900 pieces of content per account in the app, including tweets, Instagram photos and Foursquare check-ins. Eric Lagier, cofounder of the recently acquired Memolane, says that its users had an average of 3,500 posts when they first signed up and the number only increased from there. And Hoffman says Memoir users average more than 5,400 posts from the sources it syncs with.
Each year brings a host of new services and gadgets that prompt users to collect additional personal data: social networks, messaging apps, fitness devices, smartwatches, smartglasses and smartphones with better cameras, lower prices and more mass market appeal. You could potentially track the songs you favorite on Spotify, the books you mark as read on Goodreads, the movies you review on Netflix, the emails you star in Gmail, to create a fuller picture of your day-to-day life.
"What you are going to see is more apps focused on giving you a better qualitative picture of your life," Le from HeyDay says. "You are not going to be thinking about how much Nike Fuel you burned on a specific day, but you might be thinking about that tough mudder race you ran with your friends."
The more data we collect about ourselves and the better it can be organized, the closer Hoffman believes we come to what he refers to as "the holy grail:" a personal API. Or, in more layman's terms: a comprehensive database of our entire lives.
"To some extent, Facebook is trying to do this. The problem is they have surface level," Hoffman says. "What you put on Facebook is what you want the world to think of you. 'I'm cool because I'm on top of Mount Everest.' But you don't post that you threw up two hours before on your way up there, which is 90% of your life."
The grand vision for Hoffman is that lifetracking apps will rekindle the desire to record these in-between moments, Google Glass and other wearables will serve as better tools to capture them and Memoir or something like it will make all these moments easily searchable.
"That, to me, is literally memory replacement," he says, though he's quick to acknowledge it sounds like science fiction. "Imagine you're sitting with your kids in 20 years and they're like, 'What was it like to be a mom?' And you're like, 'let me show you.'"
Imagine, he says, what it would be like to live with a "perfect memory."
"He thought that by the hour of his death he would not even have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood."
Those words come from a short story published in the 1940s by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about a fictional character named Ireneo Funes. As a result of a horse-riding accident, Funes remembers every single detail from his life — each word he reads, each dream he has and each cloud he sees — down to its most granular details.
Some might view this as a kind of super power, but in Borges' story, Funes is portrayed as a person who can't see the forest for the trees. He is forever sifting through the countless details of his memories and unable to pull back enough to find their meaning. Or, as the character himself puts it, "My memory is like a garbage heap."
While this is undoubtedly an extreme, some observers we spoke with argue that the new generation of memory tools brings us a little bit closer to this scenario, and the risk that comes with it.
"The beauty of the conventional diary is that we capture what we think is important and leave out the trivial, and that it requires a deliberate act to go to the journal and look at its content later on," says Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. "The trouble begins when the diary app 'automatically' begins to capture lots of bits and pieces about what we do... so that we seem to not be able to escape our past because our tools constantly keep reminding us of it."

He adds: "There is an emotional risk to having one’s past perfectly preserved. If we can’t forget, we remain tethered to our past rather than being able to act in the present."
You wake up in the morning and receive a notification that four years earlier you were living a different life. The app pulls up a picture of your ex; you start scrolling backward through time and find countless snapshots of your apartment, check-ins from every meal out together, status updates upon status updates. You walk down the street to a diner you haven't eaten at in months and receive a notification reminding you that the last time you were there was with a friend who has since moved 2,700 miles away. Everything is shadowed by the past. You type that thought out, knowing that it too will resurface unexpectedly in this app or another one day and likely trigger the feeling all over again.
Memoir has already received feedback from users worried about being reminded of painful memories. The team's response is to remind each user that he or she is in control of their memories: if you don't like what's stored in the app, you can delete it or choose not to pull in details from particular contacts or sources. Hoffman prefers not to follow this advice.
"There are painful things from the past that some people don't want to remember," Hoffman says. "But I'm still glad I have them recorded because they are part of my history. I get a tinge of emotion, but I also think about what have I learned since then."
In fact, sometimes Hoffman deliberately seeks out the unpleasant memories. "When I broke up with my girlfriend, I was looking at what I was thinking about when I broke up with the girl before," he says, stopping to laugh for a minute after realizing how it sounds. "Because I was kind of curious!"
"It gives you context," he resumed, "and lets you look at it from a different perspective."
Some startups are now looking to go a step further and not only use past memories to provide perspective on the present, but offer actionable feedback and recommendations for the future.

Martin Källström endured an emotional few years. Both his parents passed away from cancer. Around the same time, he became a new father. He found himself wondering what memories he had preserved from his time with his parents and what memories he hoped to record with his own children. It dawned on him that something key was missing: the everyday moments.
Two years ago, he reached out to his friend and fellow entrepreneur Oscar Kalmaru, also a new father wanting to hold on to the fleeting moments of his children's lives, to help design a lightweight wearable camera that would automatically take pictures at scheduled intervals throughout the day. The Swedish startup, then called Memoto, raised $550,000 on Kickstarter in 2012 — ten times its goal — to develop the product. Late last year, it raised an additional $3 million in funding the old fashioned way, rebranded as Narrative and is now in the process of shipping the product out to those who pre-ordered it.
"Few of us have the discipline that it takes to keep that record and so the photos that you take are most often photos of moments that you think are going to feel special, but really aren't that special in the long run," Kalmaru says.
Narrative's default is to take a picture every 30 seconds — though Kalmaru says they are working to add other intervals in the future — which amounts to 2,880 photos per day. That makes the 100-150 pictures Hoffman takes each day seem downright conservative. But Kalmaru argues all this data may be used for more than reckless nostalgia; it could provide a clearer picture of our quality of life and how to improve it.
As the technology for image analysis improves, he expects that these pictures will "help us not only remember the flow of events, but ping us when it's time to make the call to the friend that you don't seem to have met for awhile because the Narrative app can tell he's not in your photos for 3 weeks." He continues: "How many hours of sunlight do you get? How often do you see people smiling and how does that correlate with your health? Can you improve your life based on what this tells you?" Narrative plans to open up its API later this year so developers can start building apps on top of this data.
Journaling app startups also see a future turning memories into recommendations.
Lagier, the founder of Memolane, expects to see more companies "distill functional data out of your own life data" and use that to provide tips "that I can immediately, tangibly say helped me to do something better." Aside from being a potential benefit to the user, he and others we spoke with acknowledge that recommendations would be an easy feature to monetize. The current monetization plan for many of these startups focuses more on charging for storage or premium features like higher-resolution photos.
Hoffman, too, fully expects that businesses will one day be able to use the data from Memoir and other apps to make recommendations, but for now he is focused on building a business out of the past. Just how big that business can grow remains to be seen, but Hoffman compares it to the impact Instagram had on photography.
"You had that one cousin who had a camera 20 years ago and would take photos everywhere. Now everybody takes photos everywhere because it has been democratized by Instagram," he says, noting that this app and others like it freed average people from the obstacles of buying and operating expensive cameras. There's an "innate" desire to take pictures, he says, and he believes the same is true of recording and sharing memories.
"I think as the technology gets better both on the software and hardware side, you'll see mass adoption."
If these tools catch on, some founders and observers we spoke with expect major players like Google and Facebook may enter the market through an acquisition or a tool of their own. (A few startups say they have already have had informal conversations with Facebook in particular.) If these tools don't catch on, these startups may one day be little more than a memory.
Either way, Hoffman and the other founders will have a detailed record of their efforts to change the way we remember our lives.
Mashable composite. iStockphoto, Jorgenmac, RUSSELLTATEdotCOM, grimgram