Momento is the Journal App You Didn’t Know You Needed

Many people have journals. Even nowadays in the digital age, journaling is still pretty popular, although like everything else, people are turning to their smartphones to help them out. Personally, journaling was never my thing. If I want to remember a special moment, I’ll take a picture and share it on Instagram or Path. If I want to make a note of something, I’ll save it in Evernote or Dropbox. But when I discovered Momento, I knew I just had to try it out. Why? Because even though it is a journaling app, you can choose to never write a single entry, and it’s still an incredibly useful app. How, you ask? Three words: social media integration. In addition to being a great journaling app, Momento can also be used to track all of your social media feeds.

Let me clarify that last statement. When I say “track all of your social media feeds”, I don’t mean like HootSuite does. This is not an app to keep up with all of your friends from across different social networks, rather, it’s an app to keep up with you: what you post on Facebook, what you tweet, where you check into on Foursquare, etc. You login to all your different accounts, and Momento shows you everything you’ve shared on a particular day. Momento allows you to connect with your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, Last.fm, and Digg. You can also add RSS and Atom feeds, but those don’t have to be your own- you can add any website’s feed. This is exactly why I wanted to try Momento out, the level of social media integration really is top notch.

Once you’ve connected your accounts, there are several different ways to view your content. The first is the ‘Days’ tab, which is the first page you’ll see every time you open up the app. In the Days tab, you’ll see a feed of all the days where you have social entry’s, or regular entry’s (which Momento calls ‘Moments’), each numbered with the date. Clicking on one of these day feeds will bring you to a separate page that has all of the entry’s from that particular day. And all of the days are grouped by the month, so it’s easy to keep track of where you’re holding.

Next, there’s the ‘Calendar’ tab. In this tab, you’ll see a Calendar that’s not unlike the one you’re used to seeing in the default calendar app. In this calendar though, you’ll notice that on certain days (or perhaps even on all of them) there are colored dots. Blue dots mean that day has a social feed, and orange dots mean that day has a Moment. Click on a day with a dot, and you’ll be taken to the page that shows you all the entries from that day. Click on a day without a dot, and you’ll be given the option to create a new Moment. The Calendar tab is great for viewing your writing consistency, as you can see exactly which days do or don’t have Moments or Feeds on them from an entire month.

Lastly, there’s the ‘Feeds’ tab, which does exactly what you’d think it’d do- show you a list of all the accounts you’ve connected. Click on one of them, and you’ll see all of your content from that account, sorted by date. Unfortunately, Twitter’s API limits restrict Momento to downloading only your latest 3200 tweets when you first connect your account (I know this may seem like plenty to some people). After connecting though, Momento will start to collect all of your new tweets, and can hold as many as you need it to.

I realize that even though I don’t use it as such, Momento is still a journaling app, so I’ll tell you a little bit about that. You add new Moments by clicking on the button in the top right corner, which looks like the ‘new tweet’ button from many popular Twitter apps. On the New Moment page, you’re given plenty of options to customize your entry. You can tag a contact or tag a place (either manually or by letting Momento access your location), you can tag events or even come up with your own custom tags. There’s even a ‘Tags’ tab, so it’s easy to access all of these tagged Moments later. You can also add stars to your Moment, and add photos to it too. I think even the most hardcore of journalists would agree that Momento has it all covered.

Whether you add entry’s to your journal every day, or even never at all, Momento is a must have app for every iPhone owner. For a long time now I’ve been looking for an app that tracks my life across various social networks, and Momento fits the bill perfectly. And who knows? Maybe after using it for a while, the journalistic features will start to impose on me, and I’ll start using the app for that too. Either way, I know that this is definitely going to be an that I use every day.