Online Activity Aggregation

Project Infobox
Self researcher(s)	Beau Gunderson
Related tools	Fitbit, zeo
Related topics	Social life and social media, Productivity, Heart rate, Sleep, Activity tracking, Location tracking
Builds on project(s)
Has inspired	Projects (0)

Show and Tell Talk Infobox
Featured image
Date	2012/02/28
Event name	Quantified Self Seattle
Slides

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Online Activity Aggregation is a Show & Tell talk by Beau Gunderson that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2012/02/28 and is about Social life and social media, Productivity, Heart rate, Sleep, Activity tracking, and Location tracking.

Description

A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:

In this talk, Beau Gunderson shares a way to bring all of your disparate data sets, from Facebook to Twitter to Foursquare to Zeo to Fitbit to Runkeeper, together in one collection to be accessed through simple APIs. It’s part of an open source development effort called The Locker Project. The goal basically is to be able to see new patterns and correlation by bringing these sources of data together. Beau shares what he learned about himself and the different questions he has about his data.

Video and transcript

https://vimeo.com/38046452

A transcript of this talk is below:

Beau Gunderson- Online Activity Aggregation

Hi, I’m going to talk a little about the (locker project 00:16) and the goal basically is to ingest all of your dispirit data sources, so like your Facebook data, your Twitter tweets, your Zeo, you know your sleep cycles, your Fitbit steps, your RunKeeper, Nike Plus, or Fuelband runs and exercise and then give them over to one API to kind of do different things, different mashups, kind of abstract all or the really hard boring parts away so you can skip straight to the analysis and visualization or the doing cool stuff things as it were. So this is a little mashup of where I’ve been, so zoom into Seattle you’ll see I have this little Foursquare check-in and our code is such that the green lines and newer and the red are older and I used to live up here and I worked down here, so there are a lot of red paths there, so now I live over here and what can you do, so these paths are all… And I didn’t have to do anything to get my Twitter locations and my Foursquare locations in there; it exposes one collection of places, and if I use any other location service that can talk to I would get those for kind of free as well. So the cool thing is that soon there will be collections for health data that give you the same things. so if you track exercises from different places or sleep data from different places or want to combined your sleep data and your exercise data and see if a day with good exercise translates to better sleep at night you’ll be able to do this. And if you’re a developer it’ll make it real easy for you and if you’re not a developer it’ll make it real easy for a developers to make that you’ll benefit from. And I’m super interested in what non-developers want to be able to do with their data. So are you saying it will be like a location based metric, so if you want to get vital signs, your heartrate, blood pressure. Right, so the location was easy to make this quick little mashup but that can also be added into you know sleep data, do I sleep well at home and compare that to vacation and classify it automatically because it’ll know where you slept that night because it’s based on geographically. So there’s opportunities to get at this data without going through the rigmarole of learning Facebook APIs, learning and creating the code to authenticate people with these different services. That’s all done for you. You just send people the Walker and say install my app here. The authenticate using the Walker authentication and you know people do it multiple times a day now and they sign up for Facebook apps and whatnot, and people kind of understand that flow and then boom, there’s your data. There’s a kind of pervasive openness and there’s a culture of wanting to save your data and give you privacy controls, let you protect it and back it up. And ten with the focus on letting you kind of free that data to do cool things. Let me see if I can show you the other things. these are states I checked into and this is an hour day distribution of my Foursquare check in so you can see I’m usually sleeping here, and more active you know. for whatever reason six and seven PM I’m pretty active, you know tops cities, and these are kind of like things like oh it might be interested to… You know just from that simple metric, wow, I check into a lot of burger places and maybe I don’t want to have that in my top three. So a lot of these contacts that don’t report their gender, but it’s pretty even which I thought was interesting. These are my last 250 pictures from Instagram and Facebook, which again I didn’t have to specify and like grab these pictures from here and these pictures from here. It’s like just one API, call and get my pictures and I used the little piece of JavaScript called (Kali?05:30) thief to grab the codes and then plot them on this (Hue?) map. So it’s interesting, for whatever reason (05:39 unclear) and not many greens or gender. Why did you choose (Kali? 05:45) It was an excuse to play around. And that’s the thing, it made it so easy that I had a question and the data was there in an easy enough way that I could just go ahead and answer it for myself, and then that led me to create this little thing. Singly is the company that’s sponsoring the development of the locker project. The locker project source is on GitHub, you can download it, run it manually. You can say I don’t want anybody else to have access to this data, and I want it on my computer. Ro you can sign up with Singly and let them host it and they’re provide locker as a service and it’s free right now and you sign up with your GitHub account. These are all the data sources that are currently in there, and I can grab my Twitter tweets. Then I can say these are all my different fields that I have for each tweet. And let’s say I want to grab the average length of the tweets on my stream, and I can say I wonder if there’s a pattern here and it will instantly answer that question for yourself; between 140 and 145 that are, and that should be impossible on Twitter, so it’s interesting to see that as well. So you can say for a retweet count, and most of the time I’m not that interesting to people, but occasionally and you can do the same kind of thing. So also I have this idea of maybe waning to look at two separate stats and scatter plots and show a table of the data, or some things have latitude and longitude, so you can map them and give each a label. Here’s a histogram of the photos, and this was just kind of a way to say you have questions about your data and maybe you don’t have JavaScript and don’t want to do any programming, you can still have this framework to ask these questions. I’m also working on a little language that you can do quick calculations in on each of these data points. So you can say, how many characters I used in all of the tweets on my feed, or search for different words and grab that. So that’s the gist of it. Does it work with Fitbit?

There is a Fitbit connector and I don’t think there are any apps created for it, but if it lets me connect to my account then I’ll make one. A lot of the health stuff there is going to be a lot of focus going for it. I’m not affiliated in any way with Singly but I send them my requests from GitHub and what not, so I’ve submitted code, but I’m super interested in making this into something that’s really hospitable to people to put there self into Quantified Self sleep tracking, emotions, moods and using a Mood Scope connector is something that I would like to see. I’m curious if you have any ideas of apps or desk sources that people want in there differently let me know.

About the presenter

Beau Gunderson gave this talk.