Re:Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook
by taliesinb on Thursday August 30, 2012 @05:17PM
(#4456879)
I've always thought there was a niche market for a complete, secure, self-hosted self-tracking solution, from keystrokes through to email, file system usage, and HTTP traffic.
If anyone knows of anything along these lines, I'd be interested to hear about it, but I suspect it doesn't exist. Probably the difficulty of doing cool things with the resulting data is one of the main reasons such a product doesn't exist.
Re:Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook
by togasystems on Thursday August 30, 2012 @05:03PM
(#4456794)
Can you name some self-trackers that you use?
Re:Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook
by ecmendenhall on Thursday August 30, 2012 @05:53PM
(#4457069)
Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (http://cronometer.com/) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (http://runkeeper.com/home) and Fitocracy (https://www.fitocracy.com/) to track exercise, Moodscope (http://www.moodscope.com/login) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (http://your.flowingdata.com/) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (http://mycro.media.mit.edu/), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).
Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.
As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.