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Re: Some thoughts on mobile - http://cdixon.org/2013...
"ah that makes sense. i thought only games mostly did that kind of feature-based pricing. still will take a bit of getting used to, especially on the productivity app side" - naveen
Re: Some thoughts on mobile - http://cdixon.org/2013...
"on your point two, i would add that a software developer also has no real way of getting you to pay for upgrades on mobile. so even if i were to charge $5 for my fancy new email app, all future work i put into bug fixes and upgrades and "exchange support" and customer service and the like will come out of my own pocket." - naveen
a personal API i’ve long been a follower of the quantified self – even back before we started calling it that and started building all this software behind it. when i was in graduate school, i remember thinking i wasn’t reading enough. so i made an effort to cut through many must-read books (75). in two years of school, i tracked (microsoft excel,... - http://x.naveen.com/post...
a personal API
 
i’ve long been a follower of the quantified self – even back before we started calling it that and started building all this software behind it. when i was in graduate school, i remember thinking i wasn’t reading enough. so i made an effort to cut through many must-read books (75). in two years of school, i tracked (microsoft excel, as you do) each page read (21,278) and the number of days (622) and kept a running log of pages-per-day (34.21). i got my goal of 10,000 pages a year and, bonus!, i got through a few classics that still continue to be my favorite stories.
 
more recently, as i’ve gotten older, i started getting more interested in tracking my health and fitness. when we are young and in our twenties, we can get away with pretty much anything. but like everyone else, the older i get, the more i realize i only have one body – and that i should try to keep it tuned to get the most performance out of it. i started at first by writing my workouts down, and then trying out all types of digital trackers. one favorite tool that came out of this period was the withings scale: it allowed me to periodically keep track of trends in my weight and body composition and allowed me to think about big trends in my life that affected performance.
 
so far, i’ve used various tools and hacks over the years to collect this data. but i’ve long wanted it all in one place – or, at least, something to give me the illusion of ‘one place’. a dataset that is a single repository and view of my body as opposed to various silos of data scattered across different services and devices. of course, this requires that we all play along in some way and make our systems open and provide APIs for getting at this data. not only are we still in the early stages of building such self awareness software, but so too are we still some ways from designing the right data sets and figuring out ways to expose them to our users. i believe the openness of the latter is just as important as the first point and i think we still have some ways to go in that regard. (for example, on many of the services i’ve tried recently, i’ve had to cobble together and reverse engineer things to pull my own raw data out in some normalized form).
 
as a part of all these experiences, i’ve always been curious about the idea of a personal API – a ‘quantified naveen’ – that would expose all of the information i knew about myself in a clean, open document. i think i’ve wanted to do this because:
 
1) i wished to play with the idea of a ‘virtual me’ that’s entirely inside the machine;
 
2) the idea of a ‘published’, always-public me has intriguied me (we share our tweets and checkins and photos and music habits to a wide audience, so why not other types of behavior and habits as well?);
 
3) and i’ve been curious what one might be able to do with such a resource: will any of it be useful for research? might one create apps on top of me? or perhaps draw insights that i haven’t yet been able to see myself?
 
as a way to start this off, i’ve put up an API of such personal data. i’m calling it api.naveen. it currently exposes sleep, weight, steps, fuel/activity and checkins. i aim to keep adding to this list with a few more interesting ones as i think of them.
 
have a look: http://api.naveen.com/
 
drop me a note and let me know what else you’d like to see and what you end up doing with this. i welcome the start of a good discussion.
 
special thanks to: eric, for coining the term ‘personal API’; sameer, for help with the data layer.
Kilo Kish - Goldmine (Prod. by Star Slinger) - http://hypem.com/track...
vespa down mcdonald avenue in brooklyn - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
vespa down mcdonald avenue in brooklyn
Play
dead horse bay; aka, dead glass bay - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
dead horse bay; aka, dead glass bay
from top of Rockefeller: Memorial Day lights on ESB. - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
from top of Rockefeller: Memorial Day lights on ESB.
EMPIRE FROM MOTT STREET, BLACKOUT SANDY - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
EMPIRE FROM MOTT STREET, BLACKOUT SANDY
Re: This is how I’ve seen P2P commerce evolve. In the... - The Gong Show - http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post...
"the first thing i thought of as i read this was your original "craigslist spawn" post – one of my favorites ever" - naveen
an april weekend in woodstock with eric, mike, danny and spencer. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
an april weekend in woodstock with eric, mike, danny and spencer.
dusk from pebble beach, brooklyn. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
dusk from pebble beach, brooklyn.
down under the manhattan bridge overpass. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
down under the manhattan bridge overpass.
spaceship coupe. credit: mars. from the drive series. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
spaceship coupe.
 
credit: mars. from the drive series.
night at the museum – #hackthemet with nick and matt. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
night at the museum – #hackthemet with nick and matt.
i got that tunnel vision for you. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
i got that tunnel vision for you.
a late saturday morning brunch at norma’s with mg, megan and mars. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
a late saturday morning brunch at norma’s with mg, megan and mars.
sharps barber and shop – le parker meridien. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
sharps barber and shop – le parker meridien.
uptown girl. on saturday, we headed up to the upper east side for an uptown day: brunch at norma’s, a walk through central park, a movie in times square and an evening at the metropolitan museum of art. - http://x.naveen.com/post...
uptown girl.
 
on saturday, we headed up to the upper east side for an uptown day: brunch at norma’s, a walk through central park, a movie in times square and an evening at the metropolitan museum of art.
listening to my good friend @sergiosalvatore at @wpi - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
listening to my good friend @sergiosalvatore at @wpi
alone at blue ribbon - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
alone at blue ribbon
a BBQ lunch in Woodstock - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
a BBQ lunch in Woodstock
a road trip on a rainy friday afternoon - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
a road trip on a rainy friday afternoon
Re: The Unbundling of Search - The Gong Show - http://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post...
"i was _just_ talking to eric friedman about this the other day. i use google less for many types of searches these days and usually just go straight to the app to do a query. i think you're right in that this is perhaps more a mobile-only behavior on the web, i still search for "software dev" or sysadmin (or weather or movies or ...) questions using google – either because it's habit from 20 years of using search engines on web – or because i know google is going to point me to stackexchange anyway. it's easier for me to just type my query into the address bar and click the first link to stack as opposed to going to stack first and then doing it there. (and perhaps limiting myself to just one dataset) if google now or spotlight had a similar ability to point you to different apps on mobile (as the general search bar does for a few things like your contacts), then i might just be more inclined to use the general search bar. but obviously, this is too hard for "personal"/evergreen data:..." - naveen
at the asia society this morning - http://www.flickr.com/photos...
at the asia society this morning
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