A small startup in Waterloo is testing the waters with an online service that aims to bridge the digital-analogue divide by turning the weekly checkins, photos, tweets and blogs of social media savvy parents into a printed story sheet delivered by mail to their children's grandparents.

The service, dubbed Flockwire, is Inflolabs second attempt to closing this particular gap. The company won a number of awards with their debut offering photoflo which allowed users to send digital images directly from their computers to their grandparent's TV by deploying an interesting an inexpensive piece of equipment called Raspberry Pi. But despite testing well, the group ran into some trouble during deployment with their core demographic. Many retirement residences are still slow to adopt WiFi — the backbone delivery mechanism for the service — into their operations. The availability of WiFi, the reliability of onsite technical support and installing the hardware ultimately forced the group to rethink their offering.

Proust.com is a new social networking site based on the popular 19th-century parlor game Marcel Proust was fond of playing. Though it was a fixture in Parisian salon culture before his time, this list of twenty or so probing questions has come to be known as the “Proust Questionnaire” simply because his answers were so… Proustian.

The developers of Proust.com, which hovers in a nebulous space between a digital scrapbook and a dating site, state that they are not Proust scholars and that the impetus for this site is to provide its users (“you”) with a way to better “know the ones you love,” by telling your story in “the spirit of sharing that the Proust Questionnaire represents.” However, in the WordPress-like interface used for this site, the line “Growing up, who did you most admire?” reminds one vaguely of a hackneyed password-reset question.

Vanity Fair has used the Proust Questionnaire as a back-page feature since 1993, and in 2009 compiled their results into the book Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life. They have even developed a “Turbo Proust” interactive version at http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/proust-questionnaire, where readers can compare their responses with the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Tom Waits and post the results to Facebook.

The developers of Proust.com do not note the popular existence of the Vanity Fair interactive Proust Questionnaire in their exposition of the site. Instead, they present it as a novel way to share and memorialize one’s personal history via photos, videos and text files. The site is ostensibly geared towards bored OK Cupid users and neophyte digital scrapbookers.

To this end, Proust.com offers its users features that Vanity Fair’s does not, such as:

a multimedia platform, where content can be edited or deleted;