Scott McMillin posts over on mad.ly:
Timelines is a place for people to record and share history about any topic. We want it to be the Wikipedia of event-based information, but unlike Wikipedia we want everyone to have a voice and add their own perspectives (and photos, videos, etc) about events.
I’m a history dork, so I created an account already. I read history text books for fun (recently I started reading Voices of a People’s History of the United States), and nailing down what really happened is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. The more voices you have (even the biased voices), the more source material, the more you have to work with to try and discern what happened. This has the potential to be an extremely excellent resource.
Scott also gives some details on the infrastructure supporting Timelines.com. Looks like PostgreSQL drives most operations, but the actual event data and media appear to be stored in CouchDB. Very interesting.