6 Tools to Quantify your Life

I’ve written before about how, as Ignighter’s CTO, I log everything I can measure.  This allows me to delve deep and gain insights about how folks are using our fledgling site.

Since discovering a love of data in my professional life, I’ve cultivated a similar affinity for data around my personal habits.  These 6 tools have helped me track financial, fitness, and health trends in my personal life.   Most of them do so with no (or negligible) manual effort.

• Withings allows you to track your weight over time.
  
• Garmin Connect lets you track your runs.
  
• WakeMate tracks trends in sleep.
  
• RescueTime allows me to see how efficiently I’m spending my digital time.
  
• Mint tracks your financial health.
  
• Dayta for the iPhone allows you to track everything else.  Manual data entry is needed for this app.
  

Do you have tools you use to track the trends in your life?  Leave me a comment below.

Twitter IS Human-Powered Search

While Google is my go-to for almost everything search, there are some situations when keyworded-search just doesn’t do. Google’s Pagerank algorithm may find answers that are most relevant to the entire web, but sometimes I want to know what people in my field, in my area, or from my past, are using. Those people know my tastes, or at least seem to have similar tastes to me. In short, I want to know what my network thinks of that query.

I’ve had some fun results using twitter to find recommended applications. In my experience, tweeps respond to queries only if they are specific and easily relateable. (see screenshots below)

Pandora vs. Last.FM. In this case, Last.FM won.

Do people recommend delicious? The answer is a resounding YES.

This one was just for fun. Turns out, many people who use Twitter have dual-monitors.

Twitter is great for web nerd questions. Below, JQuery vs. MooTools. Turns out it was JQuery 2 to 1.

4/4 of the people who responded this twitpoll respond to, welll… twitpolls. Go Figure. Must be some sort of implicit bias.

Have YOU had any luck finding interesting new applications, new hobbies, new workflows, or new people on twitter?

How to Find Interesting New Twitter-ers

I’ve been onboarding some of my offline friends to twitter lately. It’s funny how the best brands make you into an evangelist for their platform, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve found that after they get past the initial idea, and decide to sign-up, their biggest point of friction is finding new interesting people to follow.

Here are the best twitter-er finding tools I’ve found so far.

- http://wefollow.com/ – A top-down directory of twitter-ers
- #FollowFriday – Every Friday, twitter-ers recommend people they think are worth following, and append the #followfriday hashtag. Search for this hashtag to find those recommendations.
- Twitter Search – Twitter Search (formerly summize) is the best way to find what people are saying about a topic, in real time.
- Twitter’s Official Recommended Users List – While I think that Twitter recommending users defeats the purpose of a distributed network, and unnecessarily shifts the power dynamic to the users it recommends, this list remains a good place to find new twitter-ers.