Mac Users can be so shallow sometimes, insisting their UIs look the same. Creating some sort of program master race or something. :P

I guess they’re getting at the Garden of Eden imagery, so that’s why she’s naked…? I don’t think “Look! It’s a bible allegory!” is going to get people to flock to watch your show, but I guess it’s worth a shot…

Also, until Brendon talked about wondering where someone is on their way home or when they’ve gone out at night, I never thought this technology had any use. Even though the examples you listed are interesting, I still don’t really feel like your average concerned mother or spouse will use this type of thing at this point in time. The technology and awareness isn’t widespread enough amongst the masses.

I currently have playnice running in cron every 15 minutes. It seems it is capable at running every 7 minutes at best. So “Personal Analytics” wouldn’t really work if you wanted to trace a route to destinations.

The one thing that would be easy to duplicate is a personal dodgeball service for tracking where you spend most of your time. How long you stay there and how frequently you visit. That kind of implementation would be relatively easy.

I always figured one of the neat uses for geolocation is knowing when someone is around. In this “black box” idea; I would make my exact location data available to the black box, and you would do the same. Whenever we were a pre-defined distance away from each other the box would ping both of us to say, “FYI, Binks is nearby”.

This approach avoids much of the stalkerish features, as you will never have any idea where the other person really is (or at least, if they’re in an embarrassing situation you’ll be in an equally embarrassing one…)

Although… does Latitude already offer a “close to you” notification? The other issue is that the black box would kinda break down with family members or coworkers – where you’re regularly in close contact but not available to socialize… though I suppose time blackouts could help with that (If I tell the black box that I’m always unavailable from 9-5, it’ll never notify you that I’m nearby).

The other could be a sort of Dodgeball clone – defining a few hotspot locations and acting like an “in/out” board. You could have a list of Binks places (Home, school, local grocery store, favourite bar) and all that would be indicated online was little checkmark beside “grocery store” when I was within the grocery store hotspot. Only if you already knew where my preferred grocery store was would you really have any idea where I was. If I was doing something irregular, I would just show “elsewhere” on the board (or Danger’s preferred and perhaps more accurate moniker, “In Peril”)

Personal analytics would be another neat feature. Tracking for my own use where I was most often, how I got there, how long on average it took me to get there… I’m envisioning a Google maps application with a series of routes on it (the darker a route is the more often it’s travelled), connecting points (the larger/darker/other colourish) a point is the more time is spent there.

In my case that would likely be a depressing tale of how much time I spend either at school or at home, but for people who are out and about running errands more often it might be neat to see. I think a lot of people are really getting interested in personal analytics (Witness the success of the fitbit – I believe they’re still filling backorders after 6 months of shipping the product).

I’m not sure what else there is at the moment… I’ll have to think on it.

And thanks. I’ve been trying hard to keep current for a while here. It’s nice to get the opportunity to show off the theme every time there’s a new post.

I’ll still probably read it at some point, out of obligation. But I cannot foresee myself paying money for it. 

Also, kudos on being one of the only Red Cards with regular updates in content.