The most popular article ever written on this site was a comparison of the best Smart Journal apps. I limited that comparison to apps that allow usage both on mobile and desktop as well as several other criteria. I felt it was necessary to have that flexibility. But in Daylio I’ve found a hybrid app that tracks my mood and activities and have seen several benefits over a traditional Journal.

There are already some great in depth reviews of the app that I will reference below but i’ll focus on a few unique aspects that I found to be great that may not have been covered.

Using one of the aforementioned Smart Journal apps (For example Journey below) can feel a bit overwhelming. You basically have a blank slate for writing which you can supplement with items such as location, media, weather and other metadata. I struggled to journal daily feeling the pressure of filling that open canvas with text. Daylio gives me a concise prompt every day that is very simple to complete and I can optionally add text in small field if I want but it’s not required. I usually just add high level details to support the activities and mood I selected. Also, by doing this on mobile it’s easy to dictate using my voice. This has made it very easy for me to consistently add daily entries.

(comparison of Journey vs. Daylio entry screens)

Besides its ability to add custom activities, I added 2 activities to track quality of sleep by adding “slept good” and “slept bad” activities. With this I can both see how my sleep quality may affect my mood and other activities as well as compare that to my Fitbit sleep data to see if I can find any correlations. I’m sure there are other positive / negative activities that would be useful to add as well.

Daylio has excellent statistics provided in their reporting features which is where the app really shines. You can easily view your mood over time in nice visual reports as well as filter the data by individual or multiple data points to find correlations. Here’s a good review regarding this which also has many screenshots.

As being someone who wants the ability to have an external archive of my data, I was happy to see that Daylio offers exports in both PDF and CSV formats. The exports are also very good with the PDF report displaying the data similarly to the app and the CSV providing all relevant data in a clean column output.

(Daylio PDF and CSV exports)

I had tried another mood tracking app in the past. I loved the simplicity but just having a single data point wasn’t very valuable. By adding activities as well as text, the additional context really adds value and provides a way to review how you’re doing over long stretches of time.

Here’s a review by someone that provides a very detailed use case on the value he was able to glean by using the app for a long period of time. I also love the sub-text of his article which was to determine whether his life was in balance. He also pointed out that the National Institute of Health reviewed the app and I found this excerpt to be quite interesting:

Mood-quantification applications can be useful in many ways. People who suffer from mood disorders such as depression, bipolar and anxiety can use such applications to have better understanding of their moods, for example, which activities trigger negative moods. Mood quantification can also help those who want to understand how a certain medication is affecting them. Women who want to track their moods and behaviors around their monthly cycles can also use this application. Finally, patients can share their mood data with their providers for diagnosis and better treatment decisions. Applications like Daylio may have several limitations but their simplicity can help people generate useful data that can lead to better understanding of problems and issues in the long run.

National Institute of Health

If you want to see a walk-through of the app here’s a great review by TWiT

I’m really enjoying Daylio and highly recommend trying it out if any of this resonates with you.

The post Create a Minimalist Journal with Mood Tracking and Analysis Using Daylio first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

Over the last few years I have focused a large part of my attention on the digital legacy aspects of our personal data. I’ve struggled deciding whether to try and expand this site and change its structure to accommodate that information in a better way. Ultimately I decided to launch a new site at DigitalLegacyManagement.com.

I have moved, updated, and added quite a bit of information related to the digital legacy resources I had on this site. I will continue to operate Lifestream Blog and this new site for the foreseeable future. Digital legacy content may initially be duplicated across both sites but I haven’t yet decided how this will be handled in the future.

As always I appreciate your thoughts and comments on this decision and transition.

The post I’ve Launched a New Digital Legacy Resource Website first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

It appears that in recent days with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica story breaking, Dave Morin has been “overwhelmed with requests to rebuild a better Path”. Yesterday he sent out this tweet:

This outpouring is surely due to the continuing fallout from the #DeleteFacebook campaign and the growing concern of our trust being compromised with regards to sharing of personal data. Dave Morin is an alumni of Facebook and was a co-founder of Path which aimed to be a much more personal social networking app. One of its founding principles was to limit the number of people you could follow on the network citing Dunbar’s number. The app originally limited you to 50 friends but later expanded that to Dunbar’s 150. [You can read the history arc of Path on TechCrunch here.]

I was an avid user of Path. While I restrained my personal sharing on Facebook due to its nature of a more open network that I also used to share professional achievements, I shared more intimate thoughts with a closed circle on Path. After Path’s sale in 2015 my usage started to dwindle and I eventually stopped using it.

I recently wrote about the importance of decentralization and it continues to pick up steam amidst continuing news about how our personal data continues to be compromised. I responded to Dave’s tweet and a short time later he responded:

While I don’t understand how the complexity of such a project wouldn’t allow it to be created as open source, it was nice to see that decentralization is a consideration. In fact in a later tweet he mentioned possibly using Blockstack which confirms his thoughts.

I’m sure choosing open source would present quite a few challenges but I feel that it would ensure that a community could be built around a project to ensure its longevity. What guarantee as users would we have that this new project wouldn’t just be sold again like Path? An app as intimate with the amount of personal data we devote to it deserves our guarantee of trust and survival. The mere fact that that data has value to someone for purchasing it, removes the trust of having single entity owning it. We need to re-think the business model around such an important app. It’s time.

I guess by decentralizing it, the data could become portable to other apps but open source just seems like glue that would bind that. There are currently great business models in content management systems such as Automattic as a for profit entity building apps on top of open source WordPress as well as the same model in Acquia for Drupal. I’d love to see a similar model developed for a social network.

I responded to Dave’s tweet with the following, but haven’t gotten a response:

I just feel that we’re past having a private entity having ownership of something as important as a social network and there has to be a better way to create such a system that allows those who build it to make a profit while keeping the integrity and longevity of it guaranteed. I’m excited about Dave’s announcement regardless and look forward to following its progress.

In any case his original tweet has garnered quite a bit of positive interest and excitement with over 200 responses as of this writing. Here’s some additional notable ones:

Several former Path team members came out of the woodwork showing their support for building a new app. Here’s one of them.

Looks like Ryan is ready and willing to help.

I like this idea and it plays into my integrity and longevity concerns

Looks like the first investor is lined up.

Several tweets discussing a new business model. Dave says subscription only but also likes the crowdfunding or indie vc model.

And finally…

The post Dave Morin Teases New Social Networking Successor App to Path first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

Recently I’ve seen signs that are promising in the pursuit of returning focus to a decentralized web / internet. There are still many hurdles to get us there, but we have a good foundation to overcome the technical obstacles. There has been a surge of many prominent people working towards this goal. However I feel that making a compelling argument for the average person to care and adopt the concept is lacking. The prospect of moving their online activity and personal data investment will be the greater challenge. So with that preamble I’ll list a few of the reasons why I have a positive outlook and feel progress is on the right track.

The Background

This Wired article provides some great context as to why we should return to a decentralized web. It discusses how big companies now control most of the web along with our personal data. It then provides thoughts from the web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee on how he wants to change things through his open source project Solid. From the article:

On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed.

This is something I’ve always felt passionate about. It was the promise of the now defunct Locker Project which I’ve written about extensively which was supposed to allow us to create and store all of our personal data on our local machines and provide us with controls for where and how we wanted to publish it. It’s a similar concept to what has been modeled by the IndieWeb group (another big proponent for a decentralized web) with their POSSE (Publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere) with regards to websites.

The Framework and Tools

Besides Solid and the concept of POSSE there are other technologies that can help with the underlying framework of getting us back to a decentralized web. IPFS is a peer to peer protocol that aims to make data distributed, making it more permanent and not as susceptible to current limitations. IPFS can work in conjunction with the Blockchain which is another rising technology that you primarily hear about with regards to cryptocurrency but has also been mentioned quite a bit with regards to web decentralization. Hell, even Richard Hendricks wants to create a “New Internet” so that’s obviously a sign that we should do it. Right?

Every year Mark Zuckerberg takes on an annual challenge. This year’s challenge is to fix Facebook. He acknowledges how abuse of the service has negatively impacted people and his goal is to change that this year. In his announcement he stated the following:

…one of the most interesting questions in technology right now is about centralization vs decentralization…Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force… many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens

The fact that Zuckerberg acknowledges the issues and points to decentralization as important is a good sign. Time will tell how Facebook implements changes but ultimately it will continue to be a centralized repository of silo’d personal data.

The People

Dries Buytaert is another person I follow and respect who has been a strong advocate for the decentralized web. This article details his thoughts on its importance and his 2018 resolution re-iterated it as well. In it he discusses how he wants to reduce his use of social media and increase his blogging. In it he states:

The web we build today will be the foundation for generations to come and it needs to remain decentralized. It’s true that a decentralized web is harder to build and more difficult to use. Frankly, it will be difficult for the open web to win without better data portability, more regulatory oversight, better integrations, and more innovation and collaboration.

Dries mentioned data portability which is another initiative related to decentralization and personal data ownership which I began following in 2008 but has been dormant. However, this Tweet from Chris Saad (One of its founders) suggests interest in reviving it. Dries also recently blogged about beginning to use POSSE as well.

Earlier I mentioned how the Blockchain could be used as part of the framework for a decentralized web. Just yesterday a video was published with insights from many prominent people in the space including engineer Preethi Kasireddy, and VC’s Mark Suster and Fred Wilson among many others. Preethi discusses the benefits of decentralization over centralization. Fred talks about how Facebook and Google own our data and how decentralization’s greatest potential is returning control of our identity and data back to us. Mark sent out this tweet specifically citing how Blockchain’s potential for fueling a decentralized internet.

Here’s the video

Lastly, on the heels of Zuckerberg’s challenge was the announcement of the Center for Humane Technology created by a group of former Facebook and Google employees (among others) that understand how these companies leverage all of our personal data and in turn manipulate us. Their initial goal is to focus on educating people on the harm that social media sites are playing in shaping children’s behavior. They also will work on a “Ledger of Harms” which will be a resource for engineers who build sites and tools on the health effects. While this group hasn’t mentioned decentralization, I feel we can expect that it may be an initiative in their future.

What Now?

As you can see there seems to be some momentum taking us to a good place. This is all very exciting but it also brings me back to identifying what may be the compelling reason for people to buy into the need to embrace a decentralized web and stop entrusting all of their personal data to the private silos of Facebook, Google and other services. I think the answer will be by providing the value in owning our personal data and planning our digital legacy. It will also be extremely important to do this as seamlessly as possible. I feel that much like how previous generations may have clung to photos, letters, and other heirlooms to pass on to future generations we’ll realize that we need to take the same care with our personal digital data. People need to be educated and hopefully come to realize that outsourcing the ownership of their data will make it cumbersome, if even possible, for their ability to pass that data on to their families in the future.

[Update 2/13: Here’s an article describing how Microsoft plans to use a Blockchain to provide decentralized personal identity for users]

[Update 2/16: I came across this great article: Why the Web 3.0 Matters and you should know about it by Matteo Gianpietro Zago which provides a great history of the web as it relates to the current movement towards decentralization along with the framework being created to make it happen.]

[Update 2/18: Chris Dixon makes his case on the importance of decentralization and its challenges in his article on Why Decentralization Matters]

I’d love to hear more thoughts, resources, and projects related to web / internet decentralization. Please share them in the comments.

The post Return of the Decentralized Web first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

[UPDATE 9/14/18]

I’ve discovered a new journal app called Daylio that is unique and while missing many of the features listed in this roundup is worth consideration. You can read my review here.

[UPDATE 12/30/17]

I did a little research to see what has changed in the journal landscape to update this article. I did not find any new apps to add to the list and currently feel that the two top apps to consider should be Journey and Day One.

Journey has continued to get great updates and has expanded their offering to Windows, Mac, and iOS along with their support for Android and Chrome via an extension. Day One has expanded adding support for Android and has begun to add some limited cloud functionality which allows you to sync data and view it, albeit read only for now. I’ve made a few updates to the listings below as well.

In 2012 I wrote this post for The Next Web when I began looking for “smart journal” apps. I considered a smart journal app to be one that provided the following features:

• Offers posting from both mobile and desktop
• Syncing to cloud services
• Exporting to various file formats
• Calendar views
• Search
• Categories and/or tagging
• Reminder notifications to create entries
• Private with passcode by default

I reviewed my original post and took a look to see if I could find any new apps and services out there. Below is a list that contains new apps along with some from my original post that contain all of the above features and more.

If you need a reason or inspiration as to why you should keep a journal, look no further than this great post on “Why Keeping a Daily Journal Could Change Your Life“.

Journey

(Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, Web and Chrome extension)

This is a very elegant app with a nice UI and design that reminds me of Day One which is an IOS only app (see below). It’s chock full of many of the same features as well. The Chrome extension is used to write entries from your desktop and it syncs to Google Drive. You can also selectively publish posts to your social sites if you want.

As 2017 ends you can see that they continue to make improvements to the user interface and design and they are still adding many new features. You can login through the website and read your posts as well as add new ones. The web interface doesn’t offer all the features of the dedicated desktop or mobile apps but it’s nice to have that as an option and it’s included for free. The pricing model for the software is a little confusing with several different pricing options for the mobile app ($4.49), desktop software ($14.99) and cloud annual subscriptions ($29). However the free offering is very generous and you can test out quite a bit of the features before deciding to upgrade.

You can read a full review of this app here.

Day One

(iOS, Mac, Android, Web)

This app has been praised as the premiere journal app for IOS. It stands out with its beautiful design and strong feature set. To create entries on the desktop requires purchasing the companion Mac app. If you’re an IOS / Mac user you should seriously consider Day One.

2017 has finally brought Android support and while the initial release isn’t as beautiful as the iOS version it’s great to see the support expanding. The new cloud support is a pretty basic and currently only offers the ability to read data that is synced. Also the cloud support requires the $25 annual subscription to access. Still this is definitely one of the top apps worth testing out to see if it meets your needs.

Here’s a good full review of the app.

Penzu

( Android, iOS, Web)

I like Penzu because it has a strong emphasis on gaining insight from your previous journal entries. This is done by using an algorithm that provides snippets of previous entries as reminders from old entries to help identify themes and give you inspiration for new entries. It’s also got a very robust web app. Here’s a detailed review.

Diaro

(Android, iOS, Web)

I really liked the features and flexibility of this app when I wrote my first review. It continues to be improved and has added support for iOS in 2017. You can read another review of it I found here.

Momento

(iOS only)

I’ve added Momento as an honorable mention because it doesn’t offer a cloud or desktop software access but is still a great stand-alone app with lots of great features. If you’re ok just having your mobile device as the only method to store and retrieve your journal then this app is worth your consideration.

This may be one the oldest app on this list which I used when it initially was released. It as continued to be updated with features and the design is gorgeous. This app has integration with many third party apps and services and will automatically import their activity allowing you to automate some of your journal entries. This could be pretty convenient when you don’t find time or want to duplicate the content you’re already sharing publicly. It will also allow you to create private journal entries only available from the app as well.

You can start by downloading the free app and then through in-app purchases add additional features.

Originally posted on 1/19/2015

The post Top 5 Smart Journal Apps first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

A Search Bar sits atop most screens. From here you can begin typing anything and the search results will begin appearing in realtime organized into groups by categories, locations, and places. Then let’s say you tap a location from the results you are then presented with a screen that will show all the check ins at that location within a date range that you can modify to search more granular if you want as well. This makes it very easy to pinpoint anything you are searching for.

          
(Search bar and tapping on a search bar result)

The Main screen will show all of your check-ins in reverse chronological order. You can click on a check-in to get more details on the location and get insights such as how many times you’ve checked in to this location category or city. You will also see any friends and the total times they’ve checked in to the location.

          
(Home and Places Screens)

The Places screen will display a world map along with bubbles displaying the number of check-ins in aggregate based on a location range. You can pinch and zoom the map which will in turn display new bubbles. Below the map a list is dynamically generated starting with countries, and then in the case of the U.S. it will then update to display states and then locations as you pinch and zoom the map above. Any of the bubble or locations in the list below can be tapped to display more details. This is just another way that you can search your history in the context of a map instead of keywords which is a great option as well.

On the Categories screen you can get a pie chart showing your top categories and below the chart is a list of every location category along with a total count of check-ins. You can tap any of these categories to then get a reverse chronological list of your check-ins and filter further with the previously mentioned date range filters.

          
(Categories Chart and List)

The User Profile screen provides a nice overview of total Check-ins, Places, and Categories. Friends can view this page and then tap and navigate each of these screens the same way you can for yourself as mentioned above. This lets you explore friends profiles in a very detailed way which I think is great. Below that section they display your photos, friends, and stickers. The stickers are also accompanied by streaks and Mayorships which are part of the gaming aspect of the app.

(User Profile)

After using the app for about a week one feature that I’m not sure remained is the passive location tracking allowing check-ins at a later date. This provides a list of places you visited that but didn’t check-in allowing you to add them add a later date. I’m a big fan of that feature and while I was able to click on a previous notification that leads to the old screen I have yet to see any locations appear there or get a notification on the new version. I find this feature to be very important as I tend to not check-in everywhere I go and having that ability is nice.

The passive tracking feature is something that I’ve used in the Moves app as a way to supplement my Gyroscope data but that app has been very flaky for me on Android. My favorite passive location tracking is through Google Location History because of its ability to passively track data accurately and provide such a detailed history and ability to export the data.

You can read more about the history of Foursquare’s location tracking and reasoning to take Swarm in this direction by reading Dennis Crowley’s post. You can also get a behind the scenes look at how the product design came to be in Swarm 5.0 by reading Greg Dougherty’s post as well.

If keeping an accurate history of the places you’ve been is something you’d like to do I highly recommend adding the Swarm app to your suite of Lifelogging apps on your phone.

The post Foursquare Focuses on Lifelogging in Swarm 5.0 first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

According to this article on Fast Company, the team behind the series describes it as “Her meets Ex Machina” and FC continues by stating that it’s “…pondering the question of what happens to our digital identities after we pass, and what role AI can play in the grieving process.” The story takes a dark look at the future along those lines. This series would also make for a great episode of Black Mirror (now on Netflix) which is another great series that takes a dystopian look at the future.

Without giving too much away, the story is based on the premise of a social network that uses audio recordings as it’s method of communication and one aspect of the plot is based around how those recordings manifest themselves via an AI bot after a character in the story dies. If this sounds intriguing I highly recommend giving it a list. I found it to be enthralling. I’m sure we will begin to see many more stories that continue to show how technology will impact our future with many of them coming to fruition sooner than later.

The post A Fictional Story about Continuing to Live after Death through AI as Imagined by LifeAfter first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

One of the main reasons I decided to try out the Gear Fit2 was to venture into the world of smart watches since I’ve never owned one. I don’t like to wear watches and the Fitbit wasn’t very bulky or heavy and the Gear Fit2 seemed to not be much larger. I was most excited to have a device on my wrist to receive notifications. After wearing the Gear Fit2 I was pretty happy. It was comfortable. Had many new features my Fitbit didn’t have (details below) and I was enjoying it.

Shortly after receiving the Gear Fit2 Fitbit released the Alta HR. I was immediately attracted by this device. One of the biggest frustrations with the Charge HR was that my band had broken and there wasn’t a way to replace it. I liked the idea of the original Alta but it didn’t have a heart rate monitor and this new device did. The Alta HR would also allow me to get notifications from my phone (limited to SMS and Calendar but I found an awesome hack. More info below). And lastly the Alta HR (along with a few other limited devices not including the Charge HR strangely) added new deeper sleep analysis.

So I decided to order one thanks to Fitbit extending me a 25% off coupon for it as a consolation gift for my dead Charge HR and test it simultaneously along with my Gear Fit2. As you may know I’ve done this once before with 4 trackers.  After testing them both for a few weeks I’ve decided to stick with the Fitbit Alta HR. Note that this is a very subjective decision based on several personal factors that I’ll provide which may be useful. This isn’t comprehensive by any means and just focused on a few areas that I was interested in.

Gear Fit2 Pros

• Beautiful color screen with custom watch faces to highlight different metrics
• Extensive notifications with details and images
• Ability to interact with notifications. You can have canned responses with 2 taps to emails or text messages.
• Built in GPS letting you track workout locations without carrying phone
• Automatic detection of workouts
• Great charger interface. Simple magnetic base you just tap with wristband.

Gear Fit2 Cons

• A little larger than I’d like although not much larger than a Charge 2
• Doesn’t have continuous heart rate monitoring. Every 10 minutes or on demand. It is continuous during workout tracking.
• Battery life
• Non-integration with Google Fit and thus can’t integrate with Gyroscope. Samsung stores it’s data in it’s own S Health app and I found this app Health Sync to push its data to Google Fit but it was clunky and spotty. Creating data silos is a no no and this was pretty much a deal-breaker for me.

Samsung Gear Fit2 Summary

While I liked the Gear Fit2 quite a bit ultimately the things I liked weren’t enough to sway me over the new things I really liked about the Alta HR. Some of the features I personally didn’t try or find value from such as being able to control music from the device. I’ll sum this up with an easily digestible pros vs. cons specific to my wants and needs. If my cons aren’t an issue for you it may be the better choice in your case.

Alta HR Pros

• Small and light
• Good battery life
• 24/7 heart rate monitoring
• New deeper sleep analysis
• Ability to use different bands
• Integrates perfectly with Gyroscope

Alta HR Cons

• Small screen without much detail
• Limited text and calendar notifications truncated to 40 characters and only displayed once. Although using the Fit Notifications app allows you to get more notification types.
• Bad charger interface. Charge HR was horrible and this is slightly better using a cable with a clip that you need to align to the wristband receptacle.

Alta HR Summary

I really like the Alta HR. It’s a small light-weight device and while the device itself is pretty minimal, I actually think that became very attractive to me. I think losing the extensive notifications from the Gear Fit2 would be my primary concern but I found a great solution for that when I discovered the Fit Notifications app which has solved that issue. I limit what apps send notifications to my phone and for my activity tracker I would further limit those to a specific subset. For me it’s primarily work related items such as calendar, text, Slack dm’s, and WhatsApp.

The post Testing the Fitbit Alta HR vs. Samsung Gear Fit2 first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

Alethea Lange was a policy analyst at the time of the panel for the center for democracy & technology and she moderated the panel. Here’s s short video she recorded ahead of the conference.

Megan Yip is a lawyer specializing in estate planning, trust Administration, & digital assets spoke regarding the legal aspects of current laws and how they are applied differently across the United States. Megan provided some best practices around how digital data should be considered as part of your estate planning. She strongly recommends creating an inventory of your digital assets to help organize this information.

Vanessa Callison-Burch is a product manager at Facebook and was one of the people who helped develop Facebook’s legacy contact policy and functionality and she discusses that process and how it works. Vanessa discusses all the intricate details regarding how a Facebook profile becomes memorialized and what specific features are provided to the person you designate to manage your profile after you die. Another option is to simply have your complete account deleted after you die.

John Troyer who is is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath and a social scientist shared what he’s seen in regards to the are where tech and death cross paths. John talks about how he sees cemeteries evolving in the future to also contain our personal data as part of our memorial.

Here’s a curated list of all the tweets that provide discussion and resources that were collected using the #techlegacy (talk was on 3/11/16) hashtag from the talk. You can read a summary of the panel over on Engadget. The audio for the panel is available below.

https://soundcloud.com/officialsxsw/everybody-dies-what-is-your-digital-legacy-sxsw-interactive-2016

The post SXSW Panel Discussion on Death and Digital Legacy first appeared on Lifestream Blog.

I created Lifestream Blog on March 17, 2007. The initial purpose of the site was to be a resource for people who wanted to aggregate personal content onto their own page. This included original content (blog posts, videos, photos), social media (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) along with activity on sites (listens, likes, favorites, shares, bookmarks). This provided a single profile of all content and activity in one location. It was both practical and often designed in very beautiful ways. The Lifestreams displayed the content in a time ordered stream with rich content in a reverse chronological order. You can see a gallery of the many Lifestreams I created and those of others I discovered over the years in a gallery section here.

Social Media was in its infancy and creating a Lifestream was a novel concept that a niche group  of early adopters were attracted to learning more about. Initially you had to cobble together some scripts that pulled in data based on RSS feeds to create a Lifestream. This was before API’s became commonplace sometime later to make the data connections easier and exposed additional data in a way that allowed it displayed in new and more interesting ways.

While people were building their own Lifestreams and hosting them on their own sites, others in the tech community found this interesting and many startups were born to make it much easier for people to create a Lifestream. I tested out and reviewed tons of these services. The most popular of them was FriendFeed which took their user’s Lifestreams and developed a vibrant community around the content. You could comment on an item that appeared from a users Lifestream in real-time and then full conversations would evolve from there. It also became a great content discovery platform.

Eventually tons of Lifestream services appeared but none of them were able to come up with good monetization strategies and FriendFeed eventually sold to Facebook. Shortly thereafter the Lifestream phenomenon started to die down and most people ended up migrating to Twitter or Facebook. By this point API’s became prevalent and people could easily syndicate their data to those services in an effort to consolidate their Lifestreams. This rendered many of the remaining services less relevant and most of them disappeared.

Expanding to Full Personal Data Lifelogging

My focus moved on to the bigger implications and benefits of all the personal data we create digitally. During that discovery this blog expanded from Lifestreams to all personal data we generate. I came to find out that this concept had already been put in motion by Gordon Bell termed as Lifelogging in a project he worked on at Microsoft called MyLifeBits which was inspired by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision. This included collecting all forms of personal data digitally including documents, emails, photos and more and the benefits of doing this. The culmination of Gordon’s work on this project was told through his book Total Recall. I highly recommend reading it to learn more about the benefits of logging data and the implications of it after we die.

Drawing Insights Through Quantified Self

I started hearing about how people were using self-tracking methods to capture personal data to try and draw some insights and in some cases modify behavior. In 2010 I discovered a group that had formed around this concept called the Quantified Self. Then in 2011 I began experimenting with one of the earliest activity trackers collecting data on my steps, sleep and heart-rate and quickly was hooked on the concept. I later embarked on an experiment testing 4 activity trackers simultaneously for 30 days to compare them all.

The Quantified Self group hosted their first conference in 2011 which I wrote about. The group has local meetups all over the world. I attended several of their meetups in Los Angeles. I recapped one meetup on their official site and did a presentation on Digital Legacy (more on that below) at another meetup which you can watch. In 2013 I attended their conference where I was so excited to meet Gordon Bell and connect with so many other folks in the community.

I continue to follow the community and write about things I discover that move the concept forward. One of the biggest challenges is around the ability to aggregate multiple data points so that it can be analyzed to provide simple insights or recommendations to change behavior in a positive way. I tend to focus more on the apps and services that aggregate data to help achieve this. Two of my favorites in that area today are Gyroscope and HealthLab.

I look forward to the technical advancements that will continue to push this concept forward. I see a bright future enhancing our well-being with the advancements in Big Data, AI, and DNA among others providing exponential improvements for our health in the future.

Planning for our Future and Beyond with Digital Legacy

Early on in the life of this blog I began to ponder about how personal data could be preserved and packaged in a way so it could act as a digital biography of our lives persisting long after we die. I thought about how future generations of my family could learn so many more details about my life than previous ones which relied on letters, photographs, and stories. We have the capability of recording an unprecedented amount of detail today that previously was unavailable. However I don’t feel that most people are looking at what they record through that lens and even the rise of ephemeral communication apps are sabotaging that further.

Beyond the memoir aspects of our digital data things like our complete medical history and full DNA will be able to inform our future generation’s families to improve their health. I’ve also thought about how personal data and technology could transform the concept of cemeteries and our experiences within them. Artificial Intelligence and bots are also evolving very quickly and could impact how a version of ourselves may live on in the future. Whether it be in the form of a simple conversational mechanism or robotic representations.

Making sure you consider digital aspects when planning your Will is another extremely important consideration that you need to prepare for. Do you have a plan to share your passwords for access to critical data with family members? Are you aware that Facebook allows you to designate a legacy contact to manage your account after you die. Google also has the inactive account manager option to provide a way to grant access to your account after you’re gone. Many services now offer these types of features so learning about them is important to plan ahead. There are many aspects to why having a personal data preservation plan is an important aspect of securing our digital legacy and I continue to collect and share resources in this fledgling space.

The Future of this Blog

I’m passionate about these topics which continue to grow and evolve. I hope to educate and inspire others to think about each of these topics and how they can improve their lives and those of other during the course of their lives and long after. We need more great minds thinking about these topics. I have a dream that at some point we will have an app that will provide us with a repository of all our personal data that spans all of these areas from enhancing our memories, to providing insights, to centralizing important information, and eventually becoming a memoir of our lives. I plan to cover the people, apps, services and devices that continue to push these forward in new and exciting ways.

Thanks to everyone who has been a reader or contributor to this blog over the years. I hope it has provided you with value and inspiration and my aim is to continue doing just that moving forward. If you have any questions or thoughts on anything feel free to contact me.

The post A Retrospective on the 10th Anniversary of Lifestream Blog first appeared on Lifestream Blog.