Timehop has always passed the explain-your-startup-in-a-sentence test with aplomb. It's a daily email that shows you what you were doing a year ago today through Foursquare checkins, Facebook posts, and tweets. But simplicity isn't its only charm. The service, which started out as a Foursquare hack by TechStars alums Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong, switches out of social media's only gear (realtime--i.e. what's next, what's new, what's now) to look back fondly at the past.

Call us raging solopists, but it's one of the few newsletters (old news letters might be more apt) that gets opened on arrival. The self-aware copy--upbeat, not cheesy--certainly helps, especially when they accidentally email you multiple times on the worst day of the year. 

Recently, the startup tweeted out news of a big, impending update. It's currently in private beta and won't be released until next week or so, but Mr. Wegener gave Betabeat a little preview via gChat. "Basically the product is gonna become a lot more social as Timehop transitions from a lonely consumption experience of re-reading your past and moving towards a social place to discuss the past."

"Well, lonely isn't the right word haha," he added, correcting himself, "A 'one player' consumption experience."

That means a friend graph, tagging, and a (year old) newsfeed. "It makes it really easy to poke a friend and say 'Remember THIS?' and connect around those shared memories."

The new product moves Timehop away from email and more towards a web experience, Mr. Wegener explained. In the new version, users have friends. But it's not going full-on social network, the user profiles will be "pretty lightweight," eschewing a Facebook-style questionnaire about your interests.

Facebook may have made a big push towards organizing the past with Timeline, Mr. Wegener noted, but Timehop keeps the focus on what you were doing a year ago. You can browse a friend's Timeline on Facebook, but the experience of liking, say, old photos is sort of "awkward," he admitted. (As someone who has come close to commenting, "I continue to like this photo I liked in 2010," we concur.) On Facebook, "It's not really clear that the past is there for you to interact with, whereas that's our entire focus. So everyone on the service is reliving the same moment in time."

Less like solitary stalking, more like shared nostalgia.

Since the service is synched to different social media accounts, Mr. Wegener said Timehop has been particularly mindful of privacy settings. "For example if you uploaded a Facebook photo and only shared it with three friends, we won't show that to your entire graph."

So does moving to the web make it easier to monetize? "We're entirely focused on product development right now," Mr. Wegener, shrugging off the revenue question. "First we need to concentrate on making the right product so Timehop gets millions and millions of users! Once THAT little task is done, we'll think about how we can make money."

The startup has a bit of runway. In January, Timehop raised $1.1 million from seasoned Silicon Alley founders, including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and GroupMe cofounders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, as well as angel investor Rick Webb.

The way Mr. Wegener sees it, the opportunities in this market have just begun. "There's still a LOT of unexplored stuff to do in this space," he said. "Digital memories/personal Internet history is really, really unpaved. It's only recently that the world is routinely taking tons of photos, capturing their locations, and typing their 140 character thoughts into a little box."

Social media's dominion over the Internet tends to skew conversation toward the real-time. Facebook may have dropped the What are you doing right now? but the emphasis remains. Investors, however, are eager to back something that bucks that trend. Timehop, an app that culls your Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter history to answer the question What were you doing a year ago today?, just announced that it picked up $1.1 million in funding. The round was led by OATV and joined by Spark Capital. Also participating? TechStars, where co-founders Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong worked on a Craigslist competitor called Friendslist, which flopped.

Fittingly for the app, which was born as 4 Square & 7 Years Ago during a Foursquare Hackathon at General Assembly last February, the round featured some bold-faced names as angel investors, including Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai, and Alex Rainert from Foursquare, GroupMe co-founders Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, as well as Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.

The funding will be used to add two or three more more engineers to Timehop's "small team of hotshots," Mr. Wegener explained by email. Mr. Wong, "a true Ruby on Rails master" and Timehop's CTO, "came from Gilt Groupe where he single-handedly build the entire Gilt City product and then built the engineering team around it too," he said. Lead designer Rachel Nash is a veteran of both The Barbarian Group and Big Spaceship. As for Mr. Wegener himself? He was "formerly doing product management for a bunch of awesome startups and launching awesome subway apps."

Mr. Wegener's Foursquare connection—Timehop initially only pull check-ins from the app—started before that fateful hackathon. "I had a whole series of apps I called Moresquare that I presented at the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club once," he explained. Months before building the first iteration of Timehop, "I showed them to a friend who worked at Foursquare and he thought I should come present them to the team. So I did!"

It took awhile for Mr. Wegener and Mr. Wong to realize they needed to switch gears away from Friendslist and toward Timehop, "an easy to understand product that's simple yet powerful."

"Timehop wasn't intended to be giant and ambitious—it was almost an artistic expression at first, a tiny little one-day fun project. Benny and I doing what we're good at which is hacking together something quick that excites people!" Mr. Wegener wrote. The encouraging tweets and "love letters" to the product were constant. "But it was only months later that we started to realized we had accidentally solved a really important thing that hadn't been done before: we had made a compelling product that lets people reconnect and re-experience with their digital pasts. And there's a big opportunity in that."

Abe the dino helping you recall

It was all sort of an accident. Developers Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong decided to take a break from TechStars NY and have a little fun at a foursquare hackathon. "It was the one day during the entire program we didn't go to the office, just a way to step off the grind of 15 hour days," Mr. Wegener told Betabeat.

The product, originally called Foursquare-And-Seven-Years-Ago, sent users an email reminding them where they had checked in one year prior. "People had a really strong reaction to it," said Mr. Wegener. "We kept thinking of it as this jokey little app we built, but when we had so many users it was starting to cost us money just to send out the daily emails, then we couldn't ignore it anymore." 

Today the product relaunched as Timehop, which adds Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to the list of services from which users can cull their digital memories. It was a move inspired by Yipit's Vin Vicanti. "He took us to breakfast and told us that our email was one of the things he looked forward to reading each morning," Mr Wegener said.

The boys had a great product market fit, but Mr. Vacanti felt that their market, Foursquare's 15 million users, was too small. "That was the conversation that got us to bring all these other services on board as well," Mr. Wegener said.

For now the company is relying on some help from a fellow TechStars alum to get the emails out, but they are considering bringing advertisements or daily deals into the service in order to monetize. "When we tell people about the service, its kind of split down the middle," Mr. Wegener said. "Half of them get it right away and the rest look at me like I'm crazy. 'Why would I want to remember what I did a year ago?'"

Mental note, not a good service for people who feel they've peaked. But a pleasant reminder that our best ideas often come when we stop trying so hard.

"The problem with Craigslist these days, it's half duplicates and half scams and half duplicates," said Friendslist founder Jonathan Wegener, drawing a big laugh from the crowd at TechStars NY Demo day.

Wegener, along with co-founder Benny Wong, have cooked up some of the city's more exciting apps and hacks in recent months: Exit Strategy and Four Square and Seven Years Ago both enjoyed spurts of viral fame and continue to attract repeat users.

Now they are seeking to take the classified industry back to its roots, by focusing on a users social graph. It won't be easy. "The trail is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to do this, " Wegener intoned.

The key to success will be making users into middlemen connecting buyers and seller or job offers and job seekers, without forcing the person  acting as the node to do any heavy lifting. So if I hear about a great marketing gig at a start-up, I can post that position to my through my friend Dan, a uber-networked marketing pro, in order to get the message out to his social graph.

Friendslist seemed like one of the most modest ventures launching today, aiming for just $300,000 in seed capital. "We love ramen" said Wegener with a smile.