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Personal footstreams

Now that Twitter has lat/long data per-tweet, and Foursquare is growing, and Flickr has had location data attached to pictures for a while now, it begs the question… where have I been?

I would love to have a little map that can show me not only where I’ve been, but the order I went there, and the distance traveled, and the speed of travel, and the amount of time traveling.  Little personal footstreams.

Which days, weeks, or months did I cover the most ground?  Are there patterns of travel during a day, during a season, etc. What’s my personal weather history?  How does my stream of travel relate to the kinds of things I post, pictures I take, etc.

SimpleGeo might be able to help make this even more interesting.  For some reason I can’t quite wrap my head around them though.  I want all of my locations..  are they actually indexing this and can I query for it?  It would be great if I could just give them my Twitter account, Foursquare account, and Flickr account and get back amazing maps full of amazing data.  But I don’t think they’re quite there yet.  Or even going there.

All the data’s here, we just need to connect it.  Once I get a few minutes, one of these days, I’ll give it a try.  For now I am just curious if anyone else is working in this direction.  Thoughts?

This entry was posted by Buster on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 2:06 am. It is filed under Self-tracking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

13 Responses to “Personal footstreams”

  1. James Bond says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 2:17 am

    I require the ability to disappear at will. Tracking forces such as these scare the living daylights out of me.

  2. Why do they scare you? If you don’t want someone to know where you are, just don’t broadcast it, or do it within a permissioned arena (like Foursquare).

    How do you prevent people from recognizing you on the street? This is not a matter of becoming more visible, but just visible to a different group of people.

  3. I’d love it, personally. I use all three, and with the data from all three, some pretty cool visualizations could be made.

  4. Andrew Bjorn says:
    April 1st, 2010 at 6:51 pm

    Yeah, don’t they have a “home range” mapping webpage for Foursquare, which shows the areas you frequent using a shaded map?

  5. I’ve been thinking recently about this too — and also wish I had the time to put something together. It’s not quite right that this kind of data gets aggregated and analyzed first for advertisers, and second (sometimes) for us. This particular brand of personal data could be really interesting, and it is ours after all.

    I think it depends, though, on the willingness of the data collectors (foursquare, picasa, latitude, twitter, etc) to freely distribute. Given the competition at the moment, that seems unlikely, but here’s to hoping.

  6. I logged into Dopplr today and it said “You have travelled 238,921 miles.” I thought that was really cool. I’d have loved to see a stamen-like report on that.

  7. I was having exactly the same thoughts, all the data in case of locations you generate in Twitter, FourSquare, Flickr(include the photo’s aswell!) etc. have a huge personal value. I did not find an application that aggregates all the data and displays it in a handy way and i got too less time on my hands to develop it myself :( . The privacy/public discussion could be just like 750words? Private by default but sharing would be optional.

  8. Buster you’ve hit on the huge privacy detail that most people don’t even recognise yet.

    “How do you prevent people from recognizing you on the street?”

    I can stop using Twitter, Foursquare, and the other cool geo apps – but the moment I sit down in a cafe and somebody says “checking in with @rosshill”, I’m tagged! It’s like Facebook photo tagging but for location. We simply don’t have the communication elements yet to tell people our preferences for disclosure. I’m all for erring on the side of public, but there are always going to be requirements for privacy. I wonder what will emerge in this space.

  9. “How do you prevent people from recognizing you on the street?” http://enjoymentland.com/2010/04/01/personal-footstreams/

  10. I just don’t get this need to telegraph my every move. Personally I know where I’ve been and what the weather was like when I was there. It’s in the journal!

    Seriously, I wonder if we have become so focused on technology for it’s own sake that we’ve forgotten about the living people sitting right beside us. I’m not getting philosophical on you here, but stay with me a moment.

    How many times has a friend SMS’d someone else while you are tying to have a discussion with them? Or worse, received endless buzzes form their phone while you were together at dinner? Or how many times have they asked you to “hold that thought” while they answered their phone? Or put you on hold while they answered another non-important caller?

    I’ve never understood this kind of invasive messaging overload. Let’s talk to the people next to us…or leave and find someone else interesting to talk to.

    (Stepping off his soapbox.)

    Help me understand the thinking.

    …dave
    Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.

  11. [...] next version of the site will be inspired by a couple different things.  I do want to make my personal footstream visible.  I also want to distinguish between content that I make (my blog posts, tweets, and [...]

  12. Dude, that’s not how you use “begs the question”.

  13. I think this kind of application would function beautifully on an ipad, the photography quality lends yourself to “experience” the photos, many cool moves could be developed using A4 technology and an application which tracks your lifes, posts, tweets on the move.

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