year in review
This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.
Year in Review is a feature on some silos (like Facebook) as well as being a special kind of article on some IndieWeb sites that summarizes important aspects of the past year, sometimes on specific topics like books read.
In some sense these posts are derivative of and similar to handwritten letters that families might include in annual holiday cards sent to families and friends detailing their major annual updates.
There is a particular format of personal Year in Review posts/pages of "annual reports" which contain more extensive details and typically include metrics with charts and graphs, originally popularized by Nicholas Felton on his site Feltron.com from 2005-2014:
How to
How to update for the IndieWeb
- IndieWeb community page: ping Aaron Parecki in #meta to create the YYYY-created page for the year.
- ...
How to write a year in review
This section is a stub. You can help the IndieWebCamp wiki by expanding it.
If you’re writing a year in review on or about your personal website, and are not sure what to add or how many things to list, read on.
Pick the top 5 things you did on your personal site (created, made, designed, built, blogged) and highlight them and why.
Even Spotify wrapped only lists your top 5 artists, and top 5 tracks you listened to.
No need to feel pressured to document any more than that, but if you like make it a top 10 list, or pick a different criteria of what to include.
The nice thing about the "top 5" approach is that even on "slow" years, you'll likely have a top 5 things to document so you won't feel pressured to have to do more.
IndieWeb Examples
IndieWebCamp
Zoetica Ebb
Zoetica Ebb published a "Year in Review for 2015:
- 2015-12-22 Disembarking the Torpedo: Goodbye 2015
Eric Meyer
Eric A. Meyer has been posting "Year in Review" posts since at least 2015:
- 2015-12-24 A “Year in Review” Review
which itself discusses Facebook's feature of the same name.
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmüller has been posting "Year in Review" posts since at least 2015:
- 2015-12-28 My 2016 year in review
Ariel Waldman
Ariel Waldman published a "Year in Review for 2015:
- 2016-01-02 2015
Willow Bl00
Willow Bl00 published a "Year in Review for 2015:
- 2016-01-09 2015 in review
Chris Aldrich
Chris Aldrich published an IndieWeb-specific "Year in Review" on his anniversary
- http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/25/today-is-my-third-indieweb-anniversary/ Today is my Third IndieWeb Anniversary]
Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki published a Year in Review post for 2017
Gregor Morrill
gRegor Morrill published a post with some of his 2017 highlights
Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith published 2018 in numbers which details the number of posts and lots of rich data about his website (along with sparklines). The bottom of his post also includes links to several others' Year in Review articles.
Jeremy Cherfas
Jeremy Cherfas published his Annual Report: 2018, which includes some indieweb-related observations.
Tracy Durnell
Tracy Durnell has been posting a personal annual review and a creative annual review on her secondary website since 2017. Earlier reviews combined reviews and goals, but now they are separated. In 2021 she posted a year in reading and year in listening that pulls from Last.fm's year in review report.
- 2021 Personal Annual Review
- 2021 Creative Annual Review
- 2021 Year-end Reading Review
- 2021 Year in Music
Jeremy Felt
Jeremy Felt has been posting some form of annual review or reflection(s) since 2013. He maintains a list of these on a Years in review page.
Murray
Murray tries to post overviews of their year, along with goals for the year to come. These started life as "resolution" style challenges, but have evolved into more generalised "themes" around personal progress.
They have also dabbled in more data-focused, "wrapped" style posts:
Marty McGuire
Marty McGuire published Things I read in 2021 2022-01-13
indiebookclub
2023-12-02: indiebookclub added a year in review feature for the app as a whole, based on public posts:
Sara Jakša
- In 2023 there was general overview, the book reading statistics and movie watching statistics
Anthony Ciccarello
Anthony Ciccarello tries to publish an annual "Birding in YYYY" post with a summary of the birding from that year.
Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul Robert Lloyd has been writing yearly reviews for most years since 2008. He maintains a list of these in a Year in review collection.
Add yourself!
Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Silo Examples
Facebook has a "Your Year in Review" feature
Year in review prompt on your Facebook timeline, screenshot from Eric Meyer's post.
GoodReads
Goodreads gives users a "Year in Books" that recaps their year's reading progress of what they read as well as the books they finished. Typically email reminders are sent out in early December, but the review page auto refreshes based on data updates at future times. Example: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2018?int=YYiB18_sa
Last.fm
Last.fm provides an annual review of a user's listening habits in their Last.year report, released in January each year. It identifies the user's top artists, albums, and tracks from the previous year, and provides graphs visualizing user's listening habits, such as time of day and day of the week, as well as trends in genres ("tags"). Listening statistics are compared against the previous year.
Pocket regularly emails out (semi-private, but shareable) links to users to recap how many words they read during the year and the rough equivalent in number of books. They also advertise most popularly bookmarked articles and other discovery related features. Here's an example of one such year in review post from Chris Aldrich
See also: https://boffosocko.com/2018/12/28/chris-aldrichs-year-in-pocket/
Spotify
Spotify creates a personalized "Spotify Wrapped" review in December each year, which highlights a user's top-listened artists, tracks, and genres, as well as other factoids that change from year to year. It's viewable only on the Spotify app, in a "stories" style format. They also create a playlist of the user's top 100 songs from the year. While presented as an end-of-year wrap-up, it only includes data from Jan. 1 through Oct. 31.
Strava
Strava annually creates a "Year in Sport" film for your profile, go to the year.strava.com to view it, e.g.:
- https://2018.strava.com/
- https://2017.strava.com/ (at some point they dropped it! "2017 Year in Sport videos are no longer available.")
Swarm
Can be accessed here: https://www.swarmapp.com/user/year-in-review/2018
Shows counts for check-ins, categories and New Places. Then below that there is a map showing all check-ins and top 5 lists of categories and places.
Tumblr
Tumblr has a year-in-review, from at least 2022:
E.g.
- https://fandom.tumblr.com/post/702448565057961984/its-that-time-again-its-tumblrs-2022-year-in Tumblr's year in review for 2022 via their Fandom site.
Uber
Uber emailed out a "2018 year in review" on 2019-01-04 that was nearly devoid of content.
- Number of days since joining Uber, end of year rider rating - neither of which are specific to just last year
The rest of their email was about *their* overall year in review (not personal at all)
Untappd
Untappd generates a "Year in Beer" for users each year that displays your most frequently checked-in beers, styles, venues, and friends. Some statistics are compared with those from the previous year.
Brainstorming
- Chris Aldrich has indicated that since he compiles posts of what articles he reads and captures data about publishers and authors that it might be interesting to do a year in review of these to see which sources he's reading frequently, particularly as a means of adding more diversity to it.
See Also
- digest
- on this day
- weekly summary
- monthly recap
- article
- posts
- anniversary
- Issue: Cruel reminders like examples in 2014-12-29 The Guardian: Facebook apologises over 'cruel' Year in Review clips
- best nine
- https://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/2018_a_year_in_review
- https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/flashback/
- annual report
- Sam Anderson created a year in review of all the books he read in 2010 (though sadly not on his own website), but did it using photos of annotations he made in the books he read: A Year in Marginalia: Sam Anderson
- Criticism: 2021-08-03 Buzzfeed: My Phone Doesn’t Realize My Mother Is Dead
Emphasis added.My phone doesn’t realize my mother is dead. It decided to feature these photos in my year in review, queued up to soothing music. It doesn’t know that these are memories I choose to revive sparingly.
- Humorous single example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CXH2-x3Jt1S/
- brainstorm: “wrapped” for articles on any particular site/domain you browse (e.g. Wikipedia) or across all your bookmarks, or across everything you've linked to across posts, perhaps ranking top domains you've linked to. Inspired by: https://twitter.com/deejay_ayers/status/1573174723516977152
- "Wish I could get a wikipedia wrapped like Spotify so I can see all the weird shit I've looked up in one place" @deejay_ayers September 23, 2022
- Humor: Mastodon wrapped: https://strangeobject.space/@james/109439732108271388
- "Mastodon instance wrapped- You migrated to 56 instances this year
- You thought of 7897 instance names
- You bought 2 domain names
- You posted 3 toots" @james December 1, 2022
- "Mastodon instance wrapped- You migrated to 56 instances this year
- Example of a 40 question year in review template for personal websites: https://cagrimmett.com/life/2022/12/27/40-questions-for-2022/; inspired by https://stephanango.com/40-questions