UPDATE: The WSJ just wrote a very nice in-depth piece on this trend.
NOTE: this post also ended up serving as the conceptual basis for two guest pieces for Mashable, above.
We’ve had heart rate monitors for some time now. We have scales in the bathroom, speedometers (and more recently fuel efficiency measures) in the car, and all manner of timesheets in the workplace. Every day, we gather vast amounts of data about ourselves, and vast amounts of data are gathered for us (and about us). We are in many respects surrounded by gauges and dashboards, tachometers and GPS devices, calorie counters and performance metrics.
More generally, the fields of bio-science, nanotechnology and medical devices have long chronicled the goings-on of our daily lives in the most literal sense, and recent advances have extended these capabilities by an order of magnitude. Homo Erectus may have invented the hammer, but his Alexandrian progeny stumbled upon the astrolabe in 400 AD, and the rest is, so to speak, history. Well, and somewhere along the line that one message went from UCLA to SRI and Doug Englebart did the crazy demo with the wooden block on wheels.
We are in most every way an extremely “measured” society.
Tim Ferris is becoming superhuman by calculatedly measuring and extending his body’s capabilities beyond what is considered normal, much less possible. Companies like 23andMe (despite their recent woes) have come a long way in helping reveal what our DNA may or may not have in store for us, and startups like Fitbit (one of the most promising new endeavors in recent memory) are merging gadgeteering with health data with Web technology to create a new kind of personal data stream.
Incredibly, this is only the beginning. As streams on the Web, both personal and private, proliferate — “datastreaming” — the act of gathering, visualizing, analyzing and publishing personal and private data of any and all kinds — will become a predominant paradigm on the Web — it’s the natural extension of where we are and where we have been headed since the beginning. Whereas lifestreaming by turns consolidates and propagates activity across media with a wavelike pulse (filter and spread, filter and spread, wash, rinse, and repeat), datastreaming captures and extrapolates the actual, measurable, and ultimately more impactful output of that activity — and as such comprises the byproducts and artifacts of digital life and Web living.
Today’s announcement of the Google data dashboard underwhelmed some, but outliers like Factual, WolframAlpha, InfoChimps, Freebase and others prove that painting our world in data is potentially a rather valuable endeavor. Marketing at the data level is only around the corner given how programmable the Web has become. And new kinds of task-oriented apps capitalize on these vast repositories by coupling them with breakthough smarts and UI/UX advances to produce what in some ways feels like alien software sent back to us from 20 years in the future (to quote the good Mr. Flip).
Startups (and academic projects) including Daytum, FlowingData, Mycrocosom, Youtego and Personas all point towards this burgeoning trend. Now, some have been accused of peddling a particularly addictive strain of oversharing, but it’s an unfair critique — Twitter originally asked “what are you doing?” and thusly put the mirror up to society — what are we doing, in fact? Inquiring minds and bots want to know.
As Mike Arrington put it in the comments to this TechCrunch guest post by my friend Kovas Boguta: “I have no idea what it means, but it sure is pretty.” One thing’s for sure — we’re naturally curious and preternaturally drawn to infoporn — see also exhibits B, C and D (there are of course many others).
Is it good or bad? Is datastreaming healthy behavior that produces meaningful insights about ourselves, or is the Web our new vanity desk? I can’t say that I especially care. What’s far more interesting is the once and future generation of Numerati, to use Steve Baker’s term, for whom data mining and data journalism and data-driven application development are logical extensions of an experience of the world that has for longer than we usually acknowledge made data the bonfire, the totem, and the town square.
