• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, August 10, 2011

Sometimes on a Saturday morning when my son wakes up a little earlier than I would like, I bring him into bed with my wife and I and we crack open the iPad and look at pictures.  My son will swipe the pictures to the side and we'll reminisce over the fun days we've had, and he'll ask questions about places we've been.  It's fun and sentimental, but it also gets me wondering what his future "scrapbook" experience will be like.

When I was kid, we made physical scrapbooks.  We collected pictures from friends, threw them into albums, and put them in the closet to check out again when we got old.  Nowadays creating the family album is far more immediate with tools like a laptop, Flickr and YouTube.  Even Facebook becomes a virtual family album for generations to come.

 The immediacy and ease of access to those images makes it more likely that we spend time perusing those pictures on a regular basis.  I sometimes find myself thumbing through my iPhone, reviewing images and the fond memories that come along with them.

I think my kids will have fun viewing and sharing those images with their families when they get older, but I wonder just how that will happen?  What format will it take?  Will Facebook still be a tent pole of the Internet?  Will Flickr and YouTube still be around?  These questions seem silly, but remember it wasn't so long ago that you may have had Excite as your homepage, or you communicated primarily with your AOL account.  You may still have that email address, but you probably have 3 others as well.  As for Excite, well, that's just history (it's there, but it's not the same).

I imagine the virtual scrapbook will be a cloud-based account that houses all of your personal information: your pictures, movies, music and even personal documents that you want to share with your family for years to come.   Maybe your virtual scrapbook will simply be an email address that you use as a compendium of all that same content, in a chronological order that reflects when it was created?   Maybe it will be a digital safe deposit box, housed at a bank, and backed up on international servers based in Switzerland so no one can have access unless you want them to?

I can see something with a Flipboard-like interface that creates the same experience we see today when we sit with our grandparents and go through old photo albums: a page-by-page interface that tells a story, and offers insight into how our families were born, how they were raised, and how they laid the groundwork for who each of us are today.  I hope someone finds a way to make it smell like Old Spice when I peruse that album, because that will equal the same wonderful memory I have of sitting on my grandfather's lap and looking at pictures.

I know people who create email addresses for their kids, or Twitter accounts, as early as possible -- and they use those accounts to store personal messages to them, passing along a library of tips and advice to help them become the adults that would make their parents proud. 

No matter what it looks like, the experience will be the same, but even easier than it is today.  I just hope that when I'm old and grey, I still know how to use all this technology the right way!