I’m a fan of live data. It could be streaming news, tweets, photos or anything else that can be sliced and diced to be presented in a myriad of ways. If a site doesn’t have live data coming in I think the experience becomes stale. What I mean by live data is not neccessairly being updated by the second, but with the idea that if new information is available there’s a system in place to display it in a meaningful way. That’s why I’m interested these days in all the articles talking about another type of live data—the stuff that a person creates by doing something. That info could be about how far a person ran, how much they ate during a day or possibly where they’ve checked in. While I was thinking about this post and what to mention I had a couple blog posts that I wanted to include. The first was from a year ago from Frog titled FourSquare and the Future of Direct(ed) Messaging. That post gives a early view just after Foursquare was launched in SXSW. The second post about Trying Daytum: Why Self-Tracking Just Ain’t Doin’ the Job fits nicely with the idea that data isn’t enough to change someone’s habits. I figured I could easily combine those ideas into some personal experiences and be done with what I wanted to share. Then NYT’s Sunday mag published a thorough article on Wednesday about The Data-Driven Life. The NYT article didn’t change anything that I was thinking before but it does sum up a lot of different types of data that people are creating for themselves these days.

Like I mentioned, FourSquare and the Future of Direct(ed) Messaging talks about that check in device in the early days of last year. For example they talk about the Leaderboard which I don’t think is on the latest version of the iPhone app. But what the article does get right is people are motivated to do stuff to see a reward. People like earning badges. There isn’t any monetary value in them but gives ample payoff to have a goal to get something that a person can brag about. I’ve been going to the gym more times during a week and month then ever before. Why—so I can check in to where I work out. There’s supposed to be a gym rat badge that I’m pretty sure I’ve earned by checking in a more than ten times in the last month (so maybe Foursquare’s data isn’t stable as it would seem…), but at this point checking in is as important as a badge.

That leads nicely into the blog post from Get Up and Move mentioning why Trying Daytum: Why Self-Tracking Just Ain’t Doin’ the Job. Creating a stream of data is interesting but the numbers by themself don’t neccessairly change behavior. “In health/healthcare we tend to assume (erroneously) that just by presenting data a person will become self aware and make better, healthier choices. I found that is often NOT true, in fact, sometimes it’s the opposite: If you don’t like what the data shows you (a lack of delta, you’re not improving) you do NOT change your behaviors – you simply shut off the data stream. That’s what I did when Daytum calculated my average caffeine intake….” Contrast that with checking into the gym. Sure I use iFitness to log what I’ve done but what keeps me going is not the data. It’s the simple checkin.

And for the all encompassing view of data, behavior and the businesses that all this info is creating—Gary Wolf of Wired in NYT puts a lot of the players on display. There’s the Foursquare and other checkin examples, the health and fitness examples and the social examples. Reading it I couldn’t help but think of another personal example that I thought was cool to visualize but after a while felt it was more effort than it was worth to do. Ironically what I classify as effort is the idea of pressing a start button. For a while I was using Runkeeper to track my routes to work. It would take my iPhone GPS info and display it on a map showing how fast I was walking and the elevation of my route. It was interesting to look at but after a while I wondered what was the point of seeing my route? I wasn’t using it for tracking any improvements and after a while it started to look the same. Contrast that to the map above in the post. That map shows all the places that I’ve checked in with Foursquare. While Foursquare doesn’t provide a map of all places, a third party plugin called 4mapper does. I like seeing the pattern of places I’ve been in NYC. The information isn’t going to change where I go or what I do, but have a 5000 foot view of what I’m up to with a simple checkin is interesting to me. Data is interesting if there’s a pattern, but it’s how that information is sliced and diced to present a story that can be broadcasted is what makes things worth doing.