Spying on Myself and LifeTracker

Picture 3Fred Wilson had a post this weekend about MyWare and his love of it. I couldn’t agree more as i’m a huge proponent of tracking my own activity. For instance,

Fred wrote that he likes to keep this data because, “I am interested in this sector of implicit behavior data. I believe that publishing the things I do on the web will allow web services to get smarter about me and give me better experiences.” I keep track for different reasons.  I actually like to keep data about myself. I find it interesting and i use to remember events of my life.

But i see it going even further.  What i wrote was:

When i look at the web, i see people trying to capture experiences. They capture photos on flickr, videos on youtube, and notes with people on email. Their life is being tracked but not in a comprehensive way.

I could imagine a site – call it “Lifetracker.com” which tracks all the things you do. You plug in last.fm, gmail (or other email), google voice, flickr/picassa, twitter, credit card (mint), youtube and other web services. I then matches 3 things: the data, the contacts, and the time. It creates a timeline for you and marks who you’ve been interacting with and when. There’s an API so each new web service you start using you can plug into it.

There are several benefits: (1) as you mentioned, you can give this data to services for recommendations; (2) you can search your life. If google is web search, twitter is real-time search, this would be “me search”; (3) just like we don’t remember phone numbers anymore b/c we put them into our phone to retrieve any time we want, we can start throwing information into lifetracker such as meeting notes, audio recordings of phone calls, etc. so we don’t have to write stuff down and remember it. Use the cloud as a memory storage instead of your brain

I see this coming and it’s really exciting to think about it.

I do think it will happen.  What do you think?

Initial Reactions to MySpace Music

I only played around with it a little bit, but here are my initial thoughts:

The good:

  • they got all the music in there to have a big ad-supported music service.  This is not easy to do and only MySpace, Imeem, and (sort of) last.fm have done this.
The bad:
  • The interface/usability could be better. To make a playlist, you have to do a TON of clicks.  They should google “javascript” and learn more about.  It could help them out. Overall, I the interface a 4 out of 10
  • The service is not at all social. You can’t see any friends activity – no suggestions, no nothing.
  • It’s not integrated into the rest of the site.  If you go to Band of Horses page it only has 2 songs from their latest album (Cease to Begin) but if you go to music.myspace.com you search and can listen to all of the tracks from that album.  Why?
I’m sure it’ll get better but for now it’s just a repository of music to listen to.   I’ve only played around with it a bit but that’s my initial reaction.
What do you think?
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Heavy Rotation

I got a new plugin that feeds me an RSS feed of my top plays of the past week into my RSS feeder.  It’s interesting to see what my top artists are each week.  This week i’ve got:

  1. Whitest Boy Alive
  2. Born Ruffians
  3. Guns N’ Roses

The Whitest Boy Alive and Born Ruffians are two of my favorite new artists. WBA are really chill and easy to listen to while Born Ruffians are a better version of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.  I recommend you check both out.