Let me just say this. I love MyWare and use it all the time.
What is MyWare? MyWare is software you install on your computer, knowingly, that tracks what you do. It’s usually confined to a niche area like music, video, or web browsing. I am a sucker for it. I use MyWare for my music (last.fm), my searches (a9), my desktop (Google Desktop), my chats (Google Chat) and I even my credit card as MyWare as i only use it pay for stuff so i can track every penny.
Even offline there are services that do this are great and i love them. The Garmin workout tracker is great. Whenever you run outside, it plots your actual course, speed and heartrate (among a bunch of other very useful stats). When i first heard about Wayfaring.com, i thought it was a cell phone geographic tracker and i was pretty pumped (it’s not).
At Ruckus, we were building a MyWare product to help college kids find new music by populating a user’s profile with their actual listens. Last.fm similarly aggregates the data and they do the aggregation better, but at Ruckus, we did a better job of allowing users to find music using the data.
I think the trends of MyWare reflects the online social networking of society. More and more people are confortable putting their persona online. In the case of MyWare, it goes one step farther by placing actual, real usage online, not just what you want people to see. This lends some authenticity to the data and can show a more accurate dipiction of a person. There are obvious privacy concerns when you get to location and all desktop applications, but there are some low hanging fruits that i’d love to see put online.
