ThisMoment seeks to preserve your life’s highlights

ThisMoment is a new social networking and media-sharing site debuting today. Its aim is to preserve the most memorable moments of your life. It’s different from sites such as Twitter or Facebook that deal primarily with the present.

The site lets you bring together your own videos and pictures with those of others to create a “moment,” or a multimedia web site aimed at displaying your memorabilia in the best possible light. You fashion the photos or videos into a visual presentation, with text, space for friends to add comments, and maps that indicate where it happened.

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You can share the moment with friends via Facebook or through an upcoming app on the iPhone.

In addition to creating its own site, ThisMoment has also licensed its platform to Time Inc.’s People.com web site and the Symbian Foundation. And ThisMoment has licensed the right package content from the New York Times, Road & Track, and Time Inc.’s Lifestyle Group.

The San Francisco company is the brainchild of Vince Broady, a seasoned entrepreneur who started the GameSpot game news/review web site that is now part of CBS. He also spent a couple of years at Yahoo as head of its entertainment sites. He left in 2008 and started ThisMoment about a year ago.

The inspiration for it came while he was on a walk at a pier at Playa del Carmen in Mexico. He saw a giant Mexican flag against the backdrop of the pier and wanted to share the moment with friends. His own pictures didn’t come out well, so he found some that others had posted on the web. He wanted to display the whole story about the experience, but found there was no easy way to do that on Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr.

So Broady gathered a lot of the former Yahoo and GameSpot teammates from his past jobs and created the new platform. The goal is to signal to other people “what is happening in my life” via a rich and enduring digital reflection. You can pull in material from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Photobucket, Picasa, Joost and YouTube, as well as share it across those sites. You can interact with it via a computer or a mobile device.

Broady believes ThisMoment is structured to draw more emotion out of the content. Each moment is tagged with the caption, “This moment made me feel …” that users then complete. Since January, the company has been operating a closed beta with 3,000 people who have posted 8,000 Moments. In one of them, a grandmother is holding a baby. But instead of joy, the writer says the moment makes him feel sad because his smiling grandmother has Alzheimer’s.

With the Moment Maker tool, you can build a chronology of the past and also point to events in the future, like an expected graduation from college.

The site competes with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but goes beyond storing media, sending friend requests and broadcasting status updates. It also competes with presentation tools such as Slide.

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Broady said ThisMoment tries to distinguish itself with more convenient features, such as the ability to search quickly through your own media or those belonging to others. You can set privacy preferences easily for each separate moment. If you want to use it via a Facebook app, you can do so (in the near future). You can take a single moment or an entire timeline and embed it on another site or blog. People magazine, for instance, will use ThisMoment’s platform to display a 35-year history of the publication. Users will be able to add their moments from their own lives into the People magazine timeline.

The company hopes to make money through several means: advertising, licensing the platform to others, and a cut of the proceeds whenever someone sells a Momento. Broady invested $500,000 of his own money into the company and then raised an angel round of $3 million from investors including  entrepreneurs Shelby Bonnie, Mika Salmi, and Jason Hirschhorn.