Does your phone know more about your lifestyle than you do?

In the past few weeks I have been playing around with a number of interesting new mobile apps on my iPhone. I have started calling them “Lifestyle apps” for a number of reasons. First of all they are primarily mobile and as such I have them always with me – ready to be used when I whip up my iPhone. Second, they have a very basic and simple use  case – they collect information about how, were and with whom I spend my time. Third, they are inherently social – I can share the above mentioned information with my friends, family and anyone else who cares. They may have different approaches to how they do this but one way or another they know more about my lifestyle than anyone else. So what are they?

OINK
This is a little new app from a company called Milk, started by entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose. The main idea of Oink is to allow you to rate anything, anywhere. You go around places and Oink stuff. Slowly you build up credibility in certain areas (I am going after hamburgers and coffee) and with the amount of Oinks growing, your opinion matters more and more in rankings of products, services, etc… I guess what the creators are trying to build is a universal ranking system for any experience by mining the user generated Oinks (sounds dirty). The app is beautiful and rather easy to use. There is not much content in it yet (in Europe) so I wouldn’t go there looking for recommendations just yet. But the experience is great and I think they are on to something.

Path
If there was a contest for the most beautiful app on the iPhone (now that I think about it, there probably is) I’d vote for Path. The user experience and design on the new 2.0 version of Path for iPhone are amazing. The core job of Path is to track your life via different types of content you share with the app. At any point in time you can open the app and take a picture, share your location, say who you are with, just write a note and other things. This content is placed on a simple timeline with date and time tags that track you better than the FBI. The idea attracts me because it is much more personal in a sense that you are collecting this information for yourself as a kind of journal. You could in theory go to the app in 20 years and track where you have been and scroll through your encounters and experiences. I don’t see any rankings, recommendations or algorithms that would hint at a business model for the company which actually makes me feel better about the app.

Foursquare
I guess most people have heard of Foursquare by now. If not, know just that it is the first successful location based app that won the contest for THE check-in app against Gowalla (acquired last week by Facebook). This app takes a different approach to your lifestyle than the others – it is about gamefication. You check-in at different locations, score points for various things (100th hamburger joint in 100 days,…), leave tips about them and share with friends. The point I guess is to be the go to place for location. What attracts most people is who leads in the rankings of most check-ins and points, which to be honest is not that big with me. I do check the app for interesting tips when I am traveling though.

Instagram
The last of the apps I will mention may seem more of a photography app than lifestyle. But don’t be fooled – Instagram is one of the most popular iPhone apps because it combines a classy design, artsy feel and easy to use user interface. Taking a picture with it and making it look great is very easy and many people use it as a consequence. But most people don’t realize that an important part of Instagram is the fact that you share your location (if you want) when taking a picture and that you are sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and others. As such Instagram has a trail of where you have been and what did you experience in the form of a beautiful stream of pictures shared on social networks.

So why did I just spend a lot of your time with a simple description of these apps?

Once you start using them you will realize that there isn’t space for 4 of them and trust me there are a lot more of them on the App Store. I felt ridiculous at dinner today, checking in with 4 of them, taking pictures with each and writing different statuses. And I don’t think people want to take a picture, write some text and share their location with each service in the same way. They want a specific simple experience of tracking their lifestyle and sharing it with friends. So I think we will experience a boom of these lifestyle apps in the near term after which there will be consolidation in the market and we will have a few winners and a lot of losers (Gowalla was maybe the first to go, though being acquired by Facebook isn’t bad I guess).  What I do find interesting is the different approaches the four I mentioned have to tackling the same problem. Will the less complex single use case apps like Instagram beat the more sophisticated ones like Path or Oink?

What do you think? Do you track your life in an app?

One more thing: I found really surprising is that I did not use Facebook to check-in, take a picture or write a status update. For me Facebook is not a mobile app. It is too cluttered, crude, generic and confusing. Maybe it is just me but I don’t use it to create content, I just feed it from the other apps. Should that worry Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe, maybe not – he always said Facebook is a platform for sharing and connecting.

Turning thirty

Today I am leaving my twenties behind and am embarking on the next stage of my life. It does feel odd. My father used to say that most people who achieved something in their life did so in their twenties. Thank god that pressure is gone now.

I will spend the day working on stuff for Piano from my home and I’ll maybe find some time to reflect a little bit. While I would have wanted to achieve more before I turned thirty, I am thankful for the family I have, the friends that have accompanied me throughout life and of course my wonderful Cosmic Girl.

One interesting data point – it didn’t hurt.

Back from Spain

I just returned from my two and a half week holiday in Spain. I’ll maybe post more details eventually (I still got a backlog from China, meh) but we basically planned a bit of surfing and a bit of sightseeing. It ended up being most of the time surfing and my body will be recovering a few days from the strain.

I would like to point out one thing. Our constant companion for the whole trip was the Cosmic Girls iPad2 (3G, 64GB). I can’t over-emphasize how great this device was. As in London earlier this summer, we bought a prepaid data sim card for the iPad (12 €, 500 MB) and used the thing all the time. The number one used app was Maps but we also looked up plenty of information on the thing wherever we went. Whether it was surfing conditions, info on sights, restaurant recommendations or different surf schools – there was an app for everything – and if not – we still had Google.

Now why would you use an iPad over an iPhone or Android Phone?

Well reason number one is battery life. The iPad2 can go through 2-3 days of heavy (and I mean heavy, lots of 3G use, video, routing on maps using GPS) use and charges really quickly. This made it the go to device for all of our information hunger.

Reason number two is the screen size. The screen allows you to display maps in all their beauty and get a sense of a large area. If you are planning your time and trying to figure out what to see first, where are the restaurants you want to go to – the screen real-estate helps a lot. Also reading information on it is much more comfortable than on my iPhone 4.

I haven’t bought an iPad yet just because I am a power user and felt that most of the things I do require a keyboard and laptop power. Indeed I worked a few days and my MacBook Pro was very helpful. But the iPad won me over with some of the use cases I mentioned above in addition to being a great email and surfing portable. I’ll still probably wait for version 3 though.

Heroes…

Since when I was a little kid I loved superheroes. Spiderman, The X-men and others have inspired me to look beyond my petty self and be a better person. I looked up to them and envied their ability to deal with tough challenges and keep faith and courage in difficult situations. They had cool powers too. Over time as I grew older and a bit more experienced I slowly started to move towards having real life heroes. My parents come to my mind but there were others.

At some point I learned about Apple, Steve Jobs and his keynotes. At first I was not an Apple fan, nor owned any of its products. I am from the generation of people who got to know Apple from the iPod. Once I owned one – I fell in love with it and started following the company. Over the years I came to learn more about Steve, his vision, his values and his darker side from stories I read online. I guess I fell for his reality distortion field. I treasured his no bullshit attitude, his righteous approach to dealing with things, his passion for technology and what it can do for the world. I started believing he does have super powers too. He became my hero.

The thing you have to know about Steve is that he had the uncanny skill to make this reality distortion field reality. He did not sit back and wait for his vision to come to him, he made it happen. There is a lesson to be learned from that. Truth be told – there are fewer and fewer like him around and now more than ever we could have used more of him.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you Steve!

RIM lost a fan today

I really loved the Blackberry. When I got my first iPhone – I switched within 2 weeks to a Blackberry Bold and for a time I was happy. These days I use an iPhone 4 (check out the What I use page) and while I believe it is the best smartphone currently available I remained a fan of the Canadian fruit company.

The Cosmic Girl is a Blackberry user and I got her a Blackberry Torch a while ago. She is most of the time happy with it. Yes the software is quirky, slow and crashes regularly but the keyboard, BBM and powerful email has kept her satisfied. She spends a lot of time using the phone and it keeps us well connected.

In recent days she had troubles with battery life and that by itself would not be that surprising. Few of today’s smartphones last more than a day. But I investigated and found a significant update was available for the phone. While she has purchased plenty of apps from RIM’s App World I thought based the experience with iPhones and Android phones that when you upgrade the OS or change the device you just login into the App World and get your apps back.

Well the experience was horrible. First of all  the whole software update thing is slow and works basically in the same way as 2-3 years ago. At some point during the installation it seemed as if the whole process has crashed or stalled. I was already considering restarting the device and trying again when it continued (the ticking clock icon makes me go nuts). After a while the OS upgrade was done and I logged into App World. Not only was the app update process slow and confusing (progress bars with some apps showed the status 110/100, wtf?) but when completed some apps had only trial licenses! Now she has to search through her email and find the license keys to re-register the apps.

This is just bad user experience and even for tech person like me – very frustrating. Not only is RIM releasing phones that are immediately obsolete (can’t be upgraded to the newest OS) but the experience on the flagship devices is CRAP. I love the keyboard, I love BBM but once you get over those (you can type fast on a touchscreen, iMessage – nuff said) it’s game over. RIM do something!