Photo by incurable_hippie from Flickr used under Creative Commons
Had an interesting epiphany today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about documenting my life because I’ll soon be a father.
As I’ve gotten older, my memory and now, it seems more important (urgent even) to document it somehow in case my kid ever wants to see what a really dull man I am.
A while back, I had a discussion with Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marhsallk) of ReadWriteWeb fame, about GetGlue, a service that lets you checkin to stuff you’re doing, e.g. watching TV, listening to music, watching a movie, thinking about something, etc. Marshall is a fan, see here and here, and I wasn’t entirely sold.
Marshall’s a smart dude, and after listening to him, I made a mental note to try it sometime.
GetGlue has some easy benefits, e.g. it recommends content based on what you tell it, there’s a social element that exposes what your social circle is doing, it has bling and who doesn’t want bling.
As I do with most new stuff, I’ve made a conscientious effort to try it out for week or so to see if it sticks.
Back to the point.
I found myself running some errands and listening to the radio in the car. Since I’ve been testing GetGlue, I decided to checkin to what I’d heard (complying with the no-texting-while-driving laws, natch). I’m still avidly using foursquare, so I also was checking into venues. Of course, I threw in a tweet or two along the way as well.
It occurred to me that tying all these services together produces a journal of my life at a very granular (read, boring) level. For example:
- I listened to Pink Floyd and Metallica on the way to Fred Meyer to do some grocery shopping.
- I listened to Led Zeppelin, Neil Young and Pink Floyd again on the way to Steakadelphia.
- While waiting on my cheesesteak, I watched a little preseason NFL football on one TV.
- I tweeted a bit.
- Then I watched CNN on the other TV, where they were reporting that an American Airlines flight out of SFO was delayed by a tip about hijackers.
- I listened to Eric Clapton and Black Sabbath on the way home to eat my cheesesteak.
This is totally mundane crap, but then, we as people have a storied history of journaling our lives, whether in paper form, in weblogs or in status updates.
Why do we do it? It’s in our DNA.
I know very few people will care about my life in this level of detail, but for those that might, it’s a great way to document our lives accidentally.
Of course, one big issue is that it takes a handful of services to do this, making it difficult to get a complete picture.
Until Facebook sees value in it.
What do you think? Any interest in GetGlue or documenting your life?
Find the comments.
After reading one of the Beatles biographies it occurred to me how little privacy they had back then. Whatever they did, wherever they were was documented in some way by someone. I always think it would be nice of me to keep that kind of trail myself in case I ever become wildly famous. Save stone biographers some leg work. 😉
Wow! Congratulations Jake, and to your wife about the impending baby. That’s great news! Hurrah for you!
I write a diary. I wrote it by hand from 1995 – April this year, but now write it on the PC, and am slowly typing it up into a clunky web thing I made which stores it in MySQL so I can search it / print it out etc. It’s all very dull, unless you’re me or my family, as I would have loved to have known all the places and dates for stuff from when I was a kid.
I plan to print it out at some point, because of paranoia about losing my backups of the data, and lose 15 years records of stuff I / we did.
Congratulations again. When’s the due date?
Thanks very much for the wishes. We’re ecstatic. The due date is in late March.
I’ve never been able to stick at journal writing in any form really, so the automated nature of checkins is appealing, albeit a bit odd and insecure.
Interesting point. This would give you ammo in case some fame-seeker you encountered in the past came forward with an erroneous report on you.
Have you ever read a ship’s Captain’s Log? Boooooring! But the captain and others who sailed behind him find them useful.
A journal is about being mundane. A diary is more interesting. Both have value.
When I was a young angst-ridden teen I kept a journal of every music video I saw and how many times I saw it. I don’t know why I did it, but it satisfied some need in me. A need I still cannot explain. And now I have GetGlue. I would love it if I also had the option to post directly to my LiveJournal instead of Twitter or FaceBook, because at least then I could lock my updates and not annoy the heck out of my friends and followers!
Agreed. I was just thinking that tying GetGlue to Pandora would further automate it. All these services should be tied together with throttles on the outputs.
Make it so!