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May 2

Singly Hacks our API

***Update 3***

May 02, 2012 @ 5:29p

PostFirst is live! Add it to your browser here: http://bit.ly/IVRAiu  If you love it, tweet @postfirst.

No word on the other apps.  More to come pre-demo.

 

***Update 2***

May 02, 2012 @ 4:44p.

PostFirst is almost in the Chrome Store — Kristjan is filling out the form right now.

ShouldertApp has a Launchrock sign-up page running.  http://signup.shouldertapp.me/

Vacat.io has successfully crunched my data and told me that the first time I did anything on Facebook or Twitter was in November 26, 2004.  This information alone makes this my favorite app of the day thus far.

There’s a 6p hardstop to begin demos.

***Update 1***

May 02, 2012 @ 2:33p.  Beau’s project, Vacat.io goes live!

Problem: Beau doesn’t remember or know how much time he spends away from the internet… and he’s a bit worried about it!

Solution:  Build an app that uses your social media check-ins as a proxy for the time or moments that you aren’t on the internet.  If you’re not checking in, tweeting, posting a photo, etc then you might be asleep. The goal is to track this information and use it to inform how much time you should spend away from the glowing screen — that’s right, away.

Follow @needsvacatio to vote for Beau’s app!  Better yet, visit: http://vacat.io/

***Update 0***

May, 02, 2012 @ 10:30a.

The Singly crew officially hit an API deadline.  Our internal hack day.  Today we came to the office, pitched app ideas, and paired off into teams to build them using Singly’s API.  The goal is to identify all of the good, bad, and the uglies of our API.

Expect a full breakdown of what we learned from our Developer Ambassador-in-Chief, Simon Murtha-Smith (github: smurthas, twitter: smurthas), before the end of the week.  In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of the teams and their products — all of them built (quickly and simply) using the Singly API to capture normalized personal data from all over the web.

All of our work today is leading up to a May 10th Friends-of-Singly hack night.  We’re putting our tech to the test with our most talented friends on that night.

TL;DR (Blog taken over by Schutte).

Lindsay (@lschutte) + Kristjan (@kripet) + Kiko the Dog

We’re building a Chrome browser extension called PostFirst.  

Problem: We have a lot of friends.  They share a lot of links from all over the web.  How do we keep from sharing a link that our friends have already shared or seen?

Solution: A little browser extension that combs through your links from across different feeds (Twitter, Facebook, etc) and tells you if the link you’re about to share has already been shared on your network.

Remember how, on the interweb, the entire world likes to say, “First!” Well, this extension ensures that’s true.

Vote for Lindsay, Kristjan, and PostFirst by following us on Twitter @Postfirst!

Austin, Smurthas, + Temas

Meet ShouldertApp

Problem: Stop the madness! And the notifications.  The number of notifications that come through on my phone makes me insane.  I only want to hear from people who aren’t part of my inner-circle.

Solution: Select an inner-circle, the people who you really want to see notifications from, and when they take actions on any network (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), then I find out.  Anything else: nada.

Vote for ShouldertApp by following them @ShouldertApp.  (But, don’t really follow them, because I’m on the @PostFirst team and I don’t want them to win. So, follow me! Me!)

Tyler + Beau

They are both working on their own projects, but aren’t available for updates.  Since they don’t have any business people on their teams, I’m fairly certain they don’t have Twitter accounts and therefore aren’t eligible for voting.

More later. (And vote for @Postfirst!)

Mar 9

Personal analytics are the first step

Yesterday, Stephen Wolfram put out a fantastic look at everything he’s been able to measure about himself for over two decades. The volume of data he’s kept is staggering, as is the mix of curiosity and foresight he had to begin collecting some of it in the first place (keystrokes?!). And the things he extrapolated range from a profound look at when ideas form to a heartwarming white stripe that is quantitative proof of a man’s love for his family.

It’s inspiring, but it’s also a little disappointing. Wolfram only has this view because 20 years ago he started keeping track. He kept email archives and meeting schedules, logged his phone calls and started wearing a pedometer. If you were to start  today, you wouldn’t have that wealth of data for years to come. Luckily, you didn’t start today, you just might not have noticed when you started. If you use webmail, you’ve got email since the day you made the account (you don’t delete anything, right?). Your phone has a call history in it, and might already tell you who your favorite people are. Your accounts on social sites are a running log of your thoughts and activities. Your data is everywhere.

There’s the other problem: your data is everywhere. Without a good deal of effort, you can’t mash sleep measurements with your calendar to see when work stresses you out. You can’t rationalize the $25 you spent at the bar you checked into with the exercise you recorded on the dance floor. All of your data is somewhere else—actually many somewheres—which is the problem the Locker Project and similar efforts are trying to solve. Once you put all of your data in one place, you can analyze it ’til the cows come home, which your location history tells you they do slightly faster when the wind is in the right direction.

The past few years have seen plenty of personal analytics products pop up, so it’s safe to say people are interested in this stuff—but wait, there’s more. With what you know about your friends, or the data they’ll share with you, you get a whole new layer of social analytics. And forget analytics; you get a whole new universe of interactions. You get warned that all your friends already saw the link you’re about to post. Your friends and family pool their data to build an ongoing birthday scrapbook containing every photo taken at every place you’ve been together. Your doctor calls because you have a genetic marker for high blood pressure and haven’t been jogging much since all those restaurants on your vacation.

It’s nifty in the extreme what Wolfram put together, and there’s a lot more low-hanging fruit for personal analytics and everything you can learn from it. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it ends there.

Mar 8

Startup Bus diaries: Day 1

Simon is still roaring down the highway on the startup bus at 80 mph, and it sounds like he’s been cranking out code even faster. They’ll arrive in Austin, for SXSW, tomorrow.

His team is on a tight deadline to finish their project (which can be found here: getgaggle.com), so he didn’t have time to write a blog post today. But I got him on the phone for five minutes – after a few battles with the spotty cell service where he is. Here’s an update on his wild adventure:

He said yesterday feels like an eternity ago. In the morning, they crystallized their team and their idea, and then they spent the day with their heads down writing code.

The idea: Gaggle. It’s a way for you to aggregate content created by specific people during a specific period of time. For instance, SXSW. If you have 25 friends going to Austin this weekend, you can use Gaggle to send each of them a short URL where they can connect the services. Throughout the weekend, you can check Gaggle and see the check-ins, photos and posts from everyone in your group.

If you see a photo of a great party, you’ll know where you want to go. If you want to see where your friends are, just log in to Gaggle and you can see their check-ins. Then, after the weekend, the data remains on Gaggle as a 21st century scrapbook of the event.

So, the three of them divided the labor and started building.

They stopped for lunch and to use the workspace at Gangplank, a collaborative workspace in Chandler, AZ. Simon said they space is wonderful and the concept is inspiring. Members pay no money, but everyone chips in to help raise funds and keep the office in good shape. Also, he said they had great BBQ there.

Back on the road, they spent the afternoon coding. After being confronted by a dust storm so severe that the highway was closed, they had to pull over for a bit (though the software development never slowed during the storm.

They got to a hotel in New Mexico last night, and the stability of being off the road and indoors offered too productive of an atmosphere – so they stayed up all night working.

Gaggle is at the point where all three team members have built thier respective parts, and they are beginning to peice it all together. They have a tight deadline tomorrow, and it sounds like they will be working right up to the last moment.

Check back soon for more updates!

Oct 11

Screen Shot 2012-01-11 at 7.22.19 PM

Building Blocks

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just to realize them.

- Man Ray

Over the past several weeks, Singly has begun to take shape. Since we’ve been heads down working on product development, I’d like to share some of what we’ve accomplished recently.

Continuing to build on the Locker Project code base, we’ve developed the open source platform to the point where we can demonstrate an exciting range of functionality. It’s capable of syncing, archiving and indexing pictures, tweets, links and social connections across six different services, and provides a unified API to access all of the collected data.

As proof of concept, so far we’ve used it to create:

  • A link stream which shows all of the links shared with you through Twitter, Facebook, with embedded previews and full-text search
  • A combined address book with all of the people you’re connected with across Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Foursquare, Flickr and Github, which matches up the same people into a single entry and displays their most recent tweet
  • A couple of photo viewers which let you browse all of the photos you’ve shared on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare
  • A fast global search of all of the above

These basic tools nicely demonstrate the breadth of capabilities available in the platform today. We’ve also built out all of the trimmings, like making it easy to sign up and connect to all of your accounts.

Next, we’re working on opening up the platform for developers to build their own applications. Armed with JavaScript and HTML, you’ll be able to create sophisticated tools, powered by personal data, without the hassle of building a data management backend. If you’re interested, drop us a line with your email address, and we’ll put you on the list for early invitations.

Oct 8

On the shoulders of Giants

We’ve been busy over the past few months. We’ve grown, hit our stride as a team, and have hit a major product milestone we’re thrilled about. We’re also fast approaching the Web 2.0 Summit, where Jeremie is outlining a vision for the next 10 years of personal computing.

As we consider this future, we’re mindful of the industry’s past – especially its advancements due to the indelible will and art of Steve Jobs.

He went “upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision” (Pogue, NYT), with a zeal best captured by Apple’s “Think Different” campaign:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in square holes – the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo….the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.

Jobs loved to say he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts – he saw things from a unique perspective. His art changed things – how we share, create, connect, experience, and grow. Simply put – he was a Giant.

In the coming days, we’re going to share more of our culture, creations and the ways in which we, too, aspire to change things. We want to humbly recognize that we do it “standing on the shoulders of giants” — not just those of this one Giant, but also those of the entire free open source software movement and community to which even Apple owes a great deal of its success, and to which this phrase is often applied.

And, in light of this Giant’s passing, let’s (as a community, team, advisors and investors) reaffirm not just how we see the future, but how we pursue it. To borrow Jobs’ words, let’s stay hungry and foolish; ignore dogma and embrace intuition; love the art of what we do; and remember through our journey together that the dots are always connected.

Here’s to troublemakers; to giants; and to those who get to stand on their shoulders.

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