[Sociam-soton] Lifelogging apps - and stay tuned at WWDC on Monday

[electronic Max]

Hello,

Apologies for the Sat night email; as your health social machines
fellow, I wanted to share with you a quick update from the grapevine.
Since Moves really got things kicking, there have been nearly a dozen
new apps that offer similar functionality, with slightly more
"interpretive bang" - things that people are likely to want to know

Professor Jill Walker Rettberg (my friend in Norway) is writing a book on it:

"Right now I'm permitting Facebook, Google, Apple and the lifelogging
apps Saga, Chronos and Step Journal to track my every move in real
time. When they've gathered data for a week they say they'll be able
to tell me how to improve my life and serve me ads of course. And tell
me if any of my equally tracked friends are nearby. It's fascinating,
I need to see HOW they analyse/represent me for my book, and it's
utterly nuts. I'm looking forwards to turning them all off in a week
and a half...

OptimizeMe says it will show correlations like you're happier on days
when you spend time with X or wake up earlier or later or drive more
or less. But it doesn't constantly track you, you enter data yourself.
Saga and Google Now says they will suggest things you would like based
on what you've done. I'm not actually sure what else - the marketing
is likely more impressive than the results but I'll stick with it for
a week to see!"

Yet these apps are still disparate silos, all of which gather their
own data into their own databases -   Some of them, like Saga,
aggregates (like a PDS) all of your data into their servers from
dozens of services including : BodyMedia, FitBit, Jawbone UP,
MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, TripIt, Withings,
DailyMile, Facebook, Foursquare, GoodReads, Google+, Instagram,
Last.fm, MapMyFitness, MoodPanda, SocialCam, and Twitter in order to
"tell your life story" in addition to running a data logger 24/7 on
your iPhone or Android device.

Chronos has a very nice video [ http://vimeo.com/72234586 ] that
demonstrates that it's basically Moves + nice weekly analytics, like
telling you how often (in the past X days, etc) you have visited
somewhere new, and what days you have achieved certain goals (like
going to bed before midnight - one that I personally never ever meet)

With this flood of apps coming out with very slick but "one trick"
functionality, it really makes me re-think our strategy for building
'next generation' health social machines.  That is, these social
machines (iOS 8 included) are now 'current generation' - they're what
the industry feels comfortable with building.  The industry still does
not feel comfortable with 1) making users the their own data
controllers  2) letting users supervise how their data is combined and
shared  3) letting users build functionality themselves (except in a
rudimentary way with IFTTT).

Anyway a few thoughts for your Sat nights,

Max