About TryMyLife.com In August 2006, my family and I were on the way to Egypt, flying over the Aegean Sea, when an announcement was made by our captain that there might be a bomb on board our plane.  As the flight was diverted to Brindisi in Italy, I considered that if we were to be blown out of the sky by the bomb or the accompanying fighter jet of the Italian Air Force, who would know our lives and life experience and, why had I not kept a diary? After all, like many people I had never made the time to keep a diary or been lucky enough to write my memoirs, so who would know the real me, today, tomorrow and into the future? The answer was - no one would. Luckily for us there was no  bomb, it was all a hoax… !   Two weeks spent in Egypt, in a land where there is history in abundance, gave me time to think about what I could do to resolve this situation.  How could I ensure that people’s life experience could be placed somewhere and shared with other people, today and in the future? After all, most people must be like me, not having the time after a day at work to take care of all the other stuff that needs to be done just to get through life. So there is the real problem - we are all too busy living life, to sit down consciously and write a few lines here and there about our lives!   When we got back to England the issue of life experience and “what to do with it” was still weighing heavily on my mind. However, the first day back at work and the pile of “stuff” on my desk along with the hundreds of emails sitting waiting for me nearly managed to wipe these thoughts from my mind as well as my holiday. Until, that is, I got to an email from a friend inviting me to join a large social networking site. Suddenly I found myself talking about my plane experience to my friend and the idea was born - why not use social networking as the organic building blocks to record your life experience? That way you do not have to consciously sit down and spend precious time on a diary!   The honeymoon of social networking ended for me as quickly as it had started. At thirty seven I found myself feeling very old compared with the other people on the site and out of sympathy with much of the content and applications. Talking to friends and family about this many of them said the same thing, that they loved some aspects of social networking but needed something that had a more mature format and content.   So the idea to build my own “Life Networking” site for over thirties was born. It would be easy to use and have less of the time wasting stuff and more areas to add value to life. It would have a magazine area where we would publish well-written content about life experience within defined topical areas, so that people could get right to the point of why they were on the site…. a kind of “why don’t you?” for adults who want to make the most of life. People could then publish their own life experience stories via their blog into the magazine area and exchange and compare their lives. Easy! – well, not exactly. The rest of 2006 was spent planning the site and how we could build it. After all, I had never built a web site like this, nor had anyone else for that matter. From the outset, we knew we did not want to be another disingenuous social networking site. This site would be for people who were thinking about their lives and how they could make the most of every day; we wanted like-minded adults on site.   In 2007 I decided that I would devote all my time and effort to building my new site called TryMyLife.com, so I gave up my corporate job and started work on the website full-time with the aid of my small team… My dog, Nibbler and my sixty four year old mother-in-law-to-be Elaine Macgregor Hull, (who said you’re too old to build a web site, and big one at that!) Elaine has contributed and added “soul” to the site and is responsible for the life magazine area, where people can publish their own life articles as part of their blog. She’s helped define the professionally written articles we are publishing on site - well she would, as a retired Headteacher -  must remember my punctuation! As for the dog… he’s kept me sane on the long walks we have between   Skype meetings with the developer and site design overhauls!     April 2008; Nearly two years on from that flight we have a site that proves that there’s always a positive outcome when you look for one. People now have a place to store and share their life experience with others, today, tomorrow and into the distant future. Our team has grown and so has my dog, no longer a puppy! Our small team has grown by two other team members to help administrate the site.    The site has to tackle some difficult issues, the kind of stuff that happens to all of us day in and day out, which other social networks would have us hide or sweep conveniently under the carpet. It’s wishful thinking that any of us have anything other than a smiley life… well we all know that’s just not real! So that’s why on the TryMyLife site we have developed our life magazine pages to reflect real life. A good example of this found within the Career section is the section Stress and Bullying. Many of us have been stressed out at work or had that overbearing boss making unreasonable demands. So if you want to chat to someone about it or write a blog article and publish it or just read an article that may lead you to realize that there’s a different way out of the situation, then great, we have accomplished our mission.       Someone once told me that the “future is your friend.” I asked what they meant by that? They said, put simply “that when all hell breaks loose around you, just think, tomorrow will be a better day”… thus the future is your friend whatever it holds in store for you… That Is the way I think about life now and the main reason that I developed this site. We would like people to share and sample each other’s life experience. What do I mean by this? Well, tell people the great life adventures you have had and hopefully people will think “how cool does that sound!” We can then all trade life experience events and set them as both  aspirational and inspirational goals for the future. That’s why in our “Time Line Builder” you can map out  both the things you have done and the things that you want to do with your life in the future.       If you are like us, too busy living your life to the max and have little time for writing your daily diary, you can now organically grow your live experience “Treasure Chest” through the power of social networking. It’s what we call “Life Networking,” meaning it adds value to your life, so you won’t find endless amounts of applications on our site that drain you every time you go to your email inbox.   One application we have made for you is our Time Line Builder, to show your life visually to others. Start adding your family and friends in there and see their timeline joined to yours! Set your future aspirations and goals and make the most of every day of your life! We think it’s a great “life” tool and we will be building heavily on this application making it fun to use, so watch this grow… into your family and friends tree!   Our commitments to you   The TryMyLife web site is owned by iTomb Ltd and we are committed to making the most of life and making other people’s lives better, this is why we have a Triple Bottom Line ethos: People, Planet and Profit.   People  -  our site members, employees and those supported by the charities with which the site becomes involved. We will invest part of our profits into social projects to make the life experience of others better. What is more our members will decide who we help; you can read more about this in our magazine page called Make a Difference found in the Culture Section of the site.   Planet  -we will ensure that our working practice leaves as little of an imprint on the planet as possible. For this reason, as a company we have strict rules on such things as travel and we endeavour to always use video conferencing and travel only as a last resort. If you haven’t got Skype, get it, it’s fabulous and very green! The whole site has been constructed over fourteen months with only one meeting involving significant travel!  As we grow we will be looking at carbon neutral servers for hosting the site. We also aim to be a company where all future employees work completely from home thus reducing the need for travel to and from energy inefficient offices. This obviously does not include servers as these are held in secure facilities.   Profit is not a dirty word and without it the above does not work. Our site revenue comes from advertising and we will endeavour to make advertising relevant to our members and the areas of the site, whilst we do our best to make sure the companies that advertise on the site have the same social economic values as ours. We will reinvest profits back into the site to improve our member’s experience and hopefully, their lives in some small way.       Privacy and Terms and Conditions of Use   Privacy is of paramount importance to us and we have taken reasonable steps to ensure that your onsite experience is as safe as possible. There are several different privacy settings for you to choose from. You can have your full profile visible or limit it to Friends and Family only, you can even password protect your profile, so no one can see your profile! Control over your privacy status can be found in the member profile navigation bar at the top of the page view when you’re logged in. Click on “settings” and look at “Profile” and “Privacy Options” and have a look around.   Our Terms and Conditions are rigorous to protect our members and we make no apologies for this, as we will take all reasonable steps to ensure that our members’ on site experience is enjoyable and safe. We will deal with abuse of these Terms and Conditions swiftly. A Report Abuse form can be found on the site footer for members to report abuse, as well as “Flag this” buttons in the site, which will highlight a potential issue to our moderators.         We hope you enjoy the site and you can be sure that we will be adding more features to make your on site experience a fun one… Enjoy!   TryMyLife  – see if it fits   Heathcliffe Robertshaw Site Architect. TryMyLife.com