lifemetric Blog

Optimizations

Kevin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:21:17 GMT

With the help of the awesome New Relic RPM app, we were able to squeeze some more performance out of several areas of the site. I’m sure we’ll find some more hotspots and take care of them as soon as we can.

How Metrics Affect Each Other

Kevin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:24:17 GMT

I’m excited to announce a brand new feature on lifemetric: relationships. Relationships are the calculated similarities from one metric to another. They are found on the right sidebar of your home page and user pages:

Let me take a moment to explain these results:

My mood is directly proportional to the amount of sleep I get
My mood is inversely proportional to the stress in my life
My stress is inversely proportional to the amount of sleep I get

Generally the results can be interpreted as such:

Coefficient	Interpretation
-1.0 to -0.7	strong negative association
-0.7 to -0.3	weak negative association
-0.3 to +0.3	little or no association (filtered from view)
+0.3 to +0.7	weak positive association
+0.7 to +1.0	strong positive association

We’re working on making these results a little bit easier to interpret at a glance, but the inital results have been quite intriguing.

(For the statistically-inclined, these are Pearson product-moment correlation coefficientsproduct-moment_correlation_coefficient, calculated from each pairs of metrics you are subscribed to and update on a regular basis.)_

Improved Graphs

Kevin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:21:52 GMT

How do you stack up against the world? Against your self? A couple new graph features might be able to show you a little better:

You can now see further into your past, up to one full year. In addition you can flip on your averages for the period you are viewing and the world’s averages.

To access these new graphs, click the graph on your home page.

Stress Metric

Kevin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:08:53 GMT

The stress metric’s high and low endpoints have been switched. 0 now represents less stress while 10 represents high stress.

All previous entries have been switched accordingly.

Days of the Week

Kevin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:22:59 GMT

Grouping our data by weekday provides some interesting results:

What do I take away from these results? The differences are subtle, but I certainly can tell that members tend to be happier on Fridays, which is not much of a shock given the history and normally relaxed attitude of the day. I also found it interesting that Wednesday was the low point of the week for the majority of members, not Monday as I would’ve thought.

Password Reset/Change

Kevin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:13:05 GMT

lifemetric users that have forgotten their passwords can now request a new one be e-mailed to them, via the Reset Password page. If you have forgotten your password, enter your e-mail address and click Reset Password. A message will be sent to your e-mail address within moments with a new password that you can use to log back into lifemetric.

After you’ve logged in, you can change your password to something you prefer by clicking Profile.

Oh, and welcome back!

Server Move

Kevin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:52:38 GMT

To prepare for our rapid growth, we’ve scaled up to two dedicated servers for lifemetric. It shouldn’t be a problem for anyone, just all the benefits of a speed increase.

Those with lagging DNS will still hit the old server, which will be turned off in a few days after the straggling DNS have caught up.

More Major Changes

Kevin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:04:49 GMT

We’re made even more changes to lifemetric. The result of which you are currently using. We’ve got:

Dramatically improved graphs, which are now images rather than Flash, and in the old style
New user pages, with some more data like “points”
Top Users leaderboard, by aforementioned points
New sliders and visual tweaks to the Your Metrics page
Latest Entries API, which will drive some of the widgets and badges we have in the works
Random performance improvements

Details about these changes will be coming soon, I hope to dedicate a whole post to each of them. Just a one line description doesn’t do enough justice to the radical progress we’re making as we grow.

Avatars

Kevin — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:15:55 GMT

lifemetric is now displaying avatars from Gravatar. For example, check out the Mood page (you may have to refresh a few times to see someone with an avatar…)

If you don’t already have one set up, why don’t you go ahead and do so?. A lot of other sites display them as well and its completely free.

Data Updates

Kevin — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:40:38 GMT

In the interest of keeping the lifemetric community up to date with all the ways we’re helping you get access to your data, we’ve started a mini-API doc at http://lifemetric.com/data. This is a rapidly evolving document that will be updated when new formats and data are available.

We’ve also added another data feed: a CSV dump of all your entries, accessible at http://lifemetric.com/user/entries.csv. You can read more about how that works in the new API documentation.

Please report any issues or suggestions to our new feature tracker for consideration.

Help Shape lifemetric's Future

Kevin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:48:39 GMT

lifemetric is all about community, and we want that community to be as vocal as possible about its future. So we’ve taken a few cues from sites like reddit and Digg and are allowing you, the community, to vote on and suggest new features.

While we strongly believe against designing or developing by committee, we are also passionate about listening to our users. We certainly have a strong vision for lifemetric going forward, but we’re always keen on taking cues along the way. We hope you’ll use this new tool to make your voice heard.

We’ve also added the ability for any lifemetric user to comment on these feature requests and even these blog posts.

A Major Update and Influx of Users

Kevin — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:24:00 GMT

You’re riding a vastly updated and hopefully improved lifemetric! We’ve made some pretty drastic changes:

Flash charts that are more accurate, faster, and have more features than the
static charts of yore
Metrics will always stay at the last value you set them to, rather than
resetting every day
You can update a metric as many times as you want in a day, previously was
limited to 1 update per day per metric
Suggest a Metric Go ahead, it’ll pave the way for a much broader dataset

StumbleUpon (and a data tip)

Kevin — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:33:00 GMT

Whoa! We’ve got a groundswell of memberships lately. Welcome everyone from StumbleUpon to lifemetric!

I’m excited to announce we are close to pushing 500 members here, which is pretty incredible. Please tell your friends, as the fun can only increase with the more data we have.

Speaking of data, check out this tip from the yet-to-be-released lifemetric API. To get a summary of all a metric’s datapoints, just add .csv or .xml to the end of a detail page url. Like so: http://lifemetric.com/metric/show/1.csv

CSV works great for importing into your favorite statistical program like R, Matlab or even Excel. XML is nice if you’re developing an app. Either way, if you “stumble upon” (har har) something neat, be sure to pass it along to me!

Hello!

Kevin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 04:34:00 GMT

Here’s one straight from the dreams and desires of (at least) one of our users!

lifemetric now features a AIM bot that can interact with you. He (she? it?) can respond to your queries, or you can setup a time to automatically get IMed. From the comforts of your IM window you can update your lifemetrics!

His screen name is lifemetric! (how apropos.)

(Speaking of user hopes and dreams, why not pour your heart out? Let us know what you’d like to see in lifemetric! We do listen.)

For Our Canadian Friends

Kevin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 01:48:00 GMT

Oops… it turns out we were being a little too American-centric with our zip code validation.

We’re trying! To that end, we’ve fixed a ~~zip~~ postal code issue for our friends to the north. So you should be able to represent your location. Edit your profile and fill us in (make sure you select Canada as your country).

This also fixes an issue with zip codes that start with zero, like Cambridge, MA’s 02140.

(We have tons of fun location-based goodness coming up!)

New Home Page

Kevin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:58:00 GMT

Can you believe there are people that don’t know what lifemetric is? We’ve been told that the homepage was rather vague and didn’t offer much insight to what the site was about, so we’ve redesigned it.

Now visitors to lifemetric.com will see a new, revised homepage with a nice screenshot showing exactly what to expect inside lifemetric.

We hope you enjoy these changes and it encourages you to share lifemetric with your friends.

How Deep Is Your Love?

Kevin — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:54:00 GMT

For all the lovers, we’ve added a new metric: Love! Go ahead and subscribe, of if you’re not already a member, sign up today and begin tracking Love and several other metrics.

Upcoming Features and Changes

Kevin — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:18:00 GMT

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up about some new changes and features to expect in the coming days and weeks. Read on for an important change in the way metrics are calculated day-to-day and features like badges for your blog or MySpace.

lifemetric Launches!

Kevin — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 04:50:00 GMT

We’re pleased to announce the official launch of lifemetric!

We hope you’ll sign up and explore the site. There is a lot more to come!