So earlier this week, Dave and I were published in a lifetracking/streaming article (thanks to sweet friends Brynn and Chris) in the Washington Post called Bytes of Life. We thought our conference call with reporter Monica Hesse went pretty well, but neither of us expected to get the kind of coverage we did for talking about a little statistics app we’re working on that we’ve tentatively called I Did Stuff, which is basically a combination of every good idea we’ve had in the last year.
The premise for I Did Stuff lies in the belief that we’re tracking so many aspects of our life now that computers need to not only make sense of this data for our own use, but also use it to deliver status on demand. One common example I’ve used is that of the “reverse twitter”…basically to combine Google calendar, IM status, and whole host of other data sources into one remotely queryable interface. And anyone can ask this interface “Where is Dave?” and receive a response like “Well he isn’t in front of IM, but he has class in 10 minutes, so he might be in transit. But his phone is on the charger, so he either forgot his phone or is oversleeping.”
Which was a great idea a year ago, and as far as I know still hasn’t been done. But since then, this idea has grown into so much more. Not only do we want to create an AI who can infer status for others, we want it to learn more about us than we know ourselves.