year in review

From IndieWeb

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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

How to write a year in review

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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

2014-review
2015-review
2016-review
2017-review
2018-review
2019-review
2020-review
2021-review
2022-review
2023-review
2024-review

Zoetica Ebb

Zoetica Ebb published a "Year in Review for 2015:

Eric Meyer

Eric A. Meyer has been posting "Year in Review" posts since at least 2015:

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:

Ariel Waldman

Ariel Waldman published a "Year in Review for 2015:

Willow Bl00

Willow Bl00 published a "Year in Review for 2015:

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich published an IndieWeb-specific "Year in Review" on his 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.

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

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

Facebook has a "Your Year in Review" feature

fb-yir2015.png

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.

2024:

Pocket

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" summary for your profile with various video and still image elements that you can save or share.

For 2024: Open your Strava native mobile app, tap the "📋 You" button in the lower right corner, and at the top you should see "Play back your 2024" heading with an orange button: See your Year in Sport. Tap that button.

Previously:

You used to be able to go to the year.strava.com to view it for that year, at least as of 2018 (not sure when they stopped supporting this), 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.

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

    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.

    Emphasis added.
  • 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
  • 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
  • Examples writing about Spotify Wrapped on a personal site: Spotify Wrapped 2024, and Spotify Wrapped 2024
  • Strava: How to find your Year in Sport 2024: It's only on the native mobile app and not accessible via the website (and past versions e.g. 2018.strava and 2017.strava are gone). From the app home screen, tap the "📋 You" button in the lower right corner, and at the top you should see "Play back your 2024" heading with an orange button: See your Year in Sport. Tap that button.
  • ^ you should see an animation with seven "segments" (like IG story style) that auto-plays. For each segment if you press the screenshot combination of buttons on your mobile (e.g. vol-up + power on iPhone 14), in addition to taking a screenshot it will put you in a "share" screen with one or more videos or still images to share. you can tap each of these one at a time, then tap the "[↑] More" button at the bottom, scroll the list of options up a bit, and tap "Save Video [↓]" or "Save Image [↓]".
  • ^ the last "segment" is your overall summary, and shows all your sports combined. save it (as an image as noted above), then tap the "✏️ Customize" button, choose an individual sport (e.g. "👟 Run"), then "Save changes", then save that image, tap customize again, choose the next sport (e.g. "🚲 Ride"), Save changes, save image. Strava only reports summaries of two or your sports it appears. Run and Ride for me,
  • ^ after having saved all the videos/images for each "segment", you can go back to your Photos app/stream, delete the screenshots, and you should see all the videos/images you've saved, which you can then post on your own site, or use built-in image OCR to copy the text into a plain personal year in sport note summary post on your own site.
  • 2025-001 Tantek Çelik https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior

    Rather than “sharing” a premature year in review, request your “year in review” today on the 1st of the year from various services, extract the data you want, fill in any gaps, and post your year in reviews on your own site.

    • "The first of a new year seems like a good day to assemble, aggregate, summarize and publish various year in review posts for the prior year.

      When various online services create a year in review for you many weeks before the end of the year (whether #Spotify #Unwrapped or #Strava #YearInSport), it seems they are short-changing you.

      No one asks for an 11 months in review (except HR departments, which is a different problem).

      So why do people accept only an ~11 months summary when services provide such a premature “year” in review?

      When people say things like “Make every day count” do they not also believe you should “Count every day”?

      In this case, 2024 had 366 days. You should count every one of them, and every thing from every one of them.

      Rather than “sharing” a premature year in review, request your “year in review” today on the 1st of the year from various services, extract the data you want, fill in any gaps, and post your year in reviews on your own site¹.

      #yearInReview #ownYourYearInReview

      This is post 2 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts

      ← https://tantek.com/2025/001/t1/15-years-notes-my-site-first
      → 🔮


      Glossary:

      year in review
        https://indieweb.org/year_in_review
       

      ¹ https://indieweb.org/year_in_review#IndieWeb_Examples" @Tantek Çelik January 1, 2025
  • 2024 example: 2024 in numbers
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