4 ms·

Wouldn't that essentially be a system that tracked the entirety of your digital life in a sort of timeline, with metadata attached, making it easily accessible

by 9dev 5y ago

Wouldn't that essentially be a system that tracked the entirety of your digital life in a sort of timeline, with metadata attached, making it easily accessible and searchable? I have thought a lot about this and curiously, it's also what many science fiction depictions of computer systems seem to aim for - a single, integrated, computing experience, across all devices and tools.

shepherdjerred 5y ago
This is something I think about often when it comes to tools. The idea that Google had all of my location history for the past 8 years means I can see everywhere I've ever gone. I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. I can look through my browser history for any particular day. With Spotify + Last.fm I can see stats about my listening history, and with Tract.tv I can see my TV/movie watching habits. Strava tracks exercise, and YNAB tracks budgeting/spending. There's an incredible amount of health data from my iPhone + Apple Watch. It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste. Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful. [0]: https://quantifiedself.com/ https://quantifiedself.com/
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  It's exciting that the data exists, but Google's (and every similar organization's) business model is not compatible with full data transparency. They want you locked into their platform, using their tools.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    Yes exactly! It would be nice if this data were more opened up so that tools around the data could be created.
- anamax 5y ago
  > I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. Not with gmail you can't. As of a couple of years ago, gmail search was a crap-shoot. It would consistently fail on some things, occasionally fail on others, and work just fine on cases that looked (to me) to be the same. Yes, this was on a paid account.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    I use an IMAP client with Gmail and it works great. I agree that the web version of gmail has pretty poor search (which is extremely ironic)
    - anamax 5y ago
      I didn't know that IMAP supported search. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730#section-6.4.4 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730#section-6.4.4
- hateful 5y ago
  I think it's the same with a lot of other things, such as backups or proper testing - you wouldn't say backups were a waste because you never used them and you wouldn't say tests were a waste because they always passed! It's also like all the wires I have in boxes and draws at my house. As soon as I throw them out I need them!
primarydonkey 5y ago
This project comes to mind: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline
- rzzzt 5y ago
  "There is no worrying about whether a document belongs in the Letters folder or the New Project folder. It simply takes its rightful place in the time-ordered stream." https://www.wired.com/1997/02/lifestreams/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/lifestreams/
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I've dumped my SMS logs into my IMAP mailbox since 2010. I've used the "History Trends" browser extension and religiously archive my browser history. I store client IP addresses and timestamps from my IMAP server as another data-point on my physical location in the world (i.e. what network my phone is connected to when it checks-in for email). My credit card transactions dump to email as well. EXIF from photos is helpful but I haven't automated dumping those into my email. Most of my personal "note taking" is either time tracking entries for Customer billing or emails sent to myself with keywords in the subject line and the notes in the body. I wish I could get at my phone's (iPhone) browser history, call database, and location services database easily to amalgamate into my "digital life panopticon" too. I love being able to search over even this limited corpus of data. I can "remember" where I was and what I was doing on a given day pretty easily. I discovered that I can often get "organic" recollection when I prime my brain with a few context details gleaned from the digital corpus. ("I was at xxx site that day, I had lunch at yyy restaurant, and when I got back I looked at these websites... Ah, and now I remember what Bob and I talked about that afternoon!") I'd love to have audio and low frame-rate video recording on my person during all my waking hours. If I had that, though, I'd keep it completely secret (and use parallel reconstruction if I need to divulge "memories" gleaned from it to others).

by 9dev 5y ago

shepherdjerred 5y ago

This is something I think about often when it comes to tools. The idea that Google had all of my location history for the past 8 years means I can see everywhere I've ever gone. I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. I can look through my browser history for any particular day. With Spotify + Last.fm I can see stats about my listening history, and with Tract.tv I can see my TV/movie watching habits. Strava tracks exercise, and YNAB tracks budgeting/spending. There's an incredible amount of health data from my iPhone + Apple Watch. It's really cool to think that all of this data exists, but I'm not really sure that it's useful. Occasionally I've gone back through my old search history for that one old post that I wanted to re-read, or go through my Spotify listening history to find a song I really enjoyed but forgot the name of, but 99% of that data goes to waste. Quantified Self [0] is an interesting project to me since it seems to make use of data from all of these disparate sources, but I'm still not sure what the outcome of tracking all of this data is. It seems cool but not useful. [0]: https://quantifiedself.com/ https://quantifiedself.com/

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
It's exciting that the data exists, but Google's (and every similar organization's) business model is not compatible with full data transparency. They want you locked into their platform, using their tools.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  Yes exactly! It would be nice if this data were more opened up so that tools around the data could be created.
anamax 5y ago
> I can lookup any email I've ever sent/received. Not with gmail you can't. As of a couple of years ago, gmail search was a crap-shoot. It would consistently fail on some things, occasionally fail on others, and work just fine on cases that looked (to me) to be the same. Yes, this was on a paid account.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  I use an IMAP client with Gmail and it works great. I agree that the web version of gmail has pretty poor search (which is extremely ironic)
  - anamax 5y ago
    I didn't know that IMAP supported search. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730#section-6.4.4 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1730#section-6.4.4
hateful 5y ago
I think it's the same with a lot of other things, such as backups or proper testing - you wouldn't say backups were a waste because you never used them and you wouldn't say tests were a waste because they always passed! It's also like all the wires I have in boxes and draws at my house. As soon as I throw them out I need them!

primarydonkey 5y ago

This project comes to mind: https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/timeline

rzzzt 5y ago
"There is no worrying about whether a document belongs in the Letters folder or the New Project folder. It simply takes its rightful place in the time-ordered stream." https://www.wired.com/1997/02/lifestreams/ https://www.wired.com/1997/02/lifestreams/

EvanAnderson 5y ago

I've dumped my SMS logs into my IMAP mailbox since 2010. I've used the "History Trends" browser extension and religiously archive my browser history. I store client IP addresses and timestamps from my IMAP server as another data-point on my physical location in the world (i.e. what network my phone is connected to when it checks-in for email). My credit card transactions dump to email as well. EXIF from photos is helpful but I haven't automated dumping those into my email. Most of my personal "note taking" is either time tracking entries for Customer billing or emails sent to myself with keywords in the subject line and the notes in the body. I wish I could get at my phone's (iPhone) browser history, call database, and location services database easily to amalgamate into my "digital life panopticon" too. I love being able to search over even this limited corpus of data. I can "remember" where I was and what I was doing on a given day pretty easily. I discovered that I can often get "organic" recollection when I prime my brain with a few context details gleaned from the digital corpus. ("I was at xxx site that day, I had lunch at yyy restaurant, and when I got back I looked at these websites... Ah, and now I remember what Bob and I talked about that afternoon!") I'd love to have audio and low frame-rate video recording on my person during all my waking hours. If I had that, though, I'd keep it completely secret (and use parallel reconstruction if I need to divulge "memories" gleaned from it to others).