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

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

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

And a 2024 music year in review, aggregating some bits from personal notes, Last.fm, and libre.fm:

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

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