One of the first Pedantic Posts was about recording various data about your habits in the hopes of finding trends and improving your life. After hours of research, I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to record every aspect of my life. Sure there are tools that make this record keeping easier, but you still have to think about it. It is way too OCD to voluntarily start.
Today I bring the news that there have been great advancements in this field over the last 8 months. The most obvious gain is the ability to track certain activities passively – you just go about your life as you normally would and data is gathered automatically. This might not always be a good thing, but there is also a trend emerging to make this data more accessible to you. And since you have access to your data, numerous tools are popping up to help guide your analysis.
Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter have an incredible amount of interesting information about your life and they are now willing to let you use it. It is yours to keep (and share). But you don’t want to have to scroll through hundreds of tweets over the last few months. Rather, you want to see how they trend over time and splice the data any which way suits your fancy. Well now you can.
A recent Wall Street Journal blog post by Zach Seward opened my eyes to the possibilities. The author didn’t record any data on purpose – applications he was already using had plenty of data about him – Foursquare, Mint, iTunes, Last.fm, Google Earth, Google web history, and Twitter. All he had to do was use some third party tools to graph and analyze the data.
The results are astounding – a heat-map of where he spends his time (above), graphs of his temporary addictions to certain bands, how his music taste trends compared to other users, various graphs that show his most productive computer time and even his decline as an email potty mouth over the last two years. And these are just some of the possibilities.
What is next? It is still slightly too difficult for the general population to take advantage of this – most people don’t want to pull together various tools like Graph Your Inbox or Where Do You Go. But it will only get easier. Will your 2013 Foursquare heatmap become a lazy-man’s scrapbook that you can readily share and take with you anywhere? Only time will tell …
It is also a possibility that people will oppose having their data tracked automatically and actually do something about it. In other words stop using Google! Blasphemy, I know. Check out this “illustrated guide” as to why all this automatic tracking is bad.
Photo: Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal with the help of Foursquare, Google Maps, and Where Do You Go
How much foursquaring do you have to do to get a heatmap like that? I don’t think my twice monthly checkins are going to tell me too much
The application does have some settings where you can turn up the sensitivity of the heatmap, but you are right yours probably wouldn’t be too interesting. It’d be better if you could do this without even checking in anywhere – our phones have GPS and constantly know where we are, what if Foursquare automatically checked the GPS location every ten minutes rather than forcing you to check in to a location?