The Time When

June 30, 2006

The BBC have launched a new web 2.0 concept site (designed to help them work out how they could convert bbc.co.uk into a full on community service) called The Time When.

The concept of the site is to pull together a collection of personal stories from people on a specific day.

You visit the site, type in a date and you get things who was the Prime Minister, key events in history, Monach of Great Britian and the US Prime Minister - plus links through to Wikipedia and BBCs own On This Day site.

But the interesting part is that it gives you stories written by site users for that specific day as well - the headline item is My First World Cup Memory right now.

The site isn’t overly attractive, it’s a very simple, slightly old fashioned looking site without much in the way of bells and whistles but as a proof of concept and in terms of pure usability its brilliant.

What I like about this concept the most is that it plays on the concept “there is a story behind every door” and gives the average user the tools to tell that story.

I was working on a similar idea a while ago for the bbc.co.uk/jersey site but without the flexibility of a web 2.0d site like this one - I had to work within the strict perl based structure of the current bbc.co.uk site.

http://www.thetimewhen.co.uk/

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