Tictrac is a personal analytics platform that aims to allow people to take control of their data, display it in a dashboard and use it to inform better life decisions.
Tapping into the trend for self-hacking or "the quantified self", Tictrac allows you to make use of the data trails we leave across the web and cross-reference them to spot patterns that you can act on.
Tictrac, which is currently in closed beta, lets you pull in data from a huge range of sources, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Klout, LinkedIn, Runkeeper, Withings Wi-Fi weighing scales, your calendar, location data, spending habits, the weather -- pretty much anything with an API that falls under the categories of finance, family, career, social, wellbeing, leisure and fitness.
Tictrac has a list of 40 of these APIs that it's implementing, and the team will be looking, down the line, to partner with services that don't necessarily have APIs yet.
Founder and CEO of Tictrac, Martin Blinder, says the service is powered by the convergence of data, rather than devices. "New formats are enabling us to bring datasets together and drive compelling insights," he said, adding: "We believe that there's value in providing people with a dashboard of their 'current state of affairs', a single place where they can review the latest stats about their different online activities, from check-ins to email, current weight to today's lunch spend. By just having one's activity data in one place, users can immediately understand how they are doing at any given time and across need-states."
There are, of course, existing apps such as Runkeeper that allow you to track runs and compare performance on one day to that of another, and there are sleep monitors such as Zeo. However, Tictrac allows you to make comparisons across these data streams to find unexpected correlations.
One example might be comparing your running patterns to your work diary and your weight (as measured by your Wi-Fi scales).
While it might be obvious that if you eat too much and move too little you'll fill out a bit, Tictrac lets you track down which factor might be causing the weight gain. It might turn out that even though you're running more than normal, you're putting on weight because you\ve been to more business breakfasts and lunches than normal. Another example might be comparing your blood pressure to the number of emails you receive and meetings you have.
Blinder explains: "We believe users can uncover more about themselves by crossing this data. They can also learn how ancillary information like weather, season, lunar calendar, etc, affect their behaviour or mood."
As the platform gains users, you'll be able to compare your performance to others. Do you have as many Facebook friends as other people of your demographic? Does your baby cry more or less than other babies of its age?
Tictrac encourages you to create little projects for yourself, for example to lose a stone, to get that new job or to monitor how your baby is growing up. Blinder explains: "We believe people live life in little projects. We've therefore designed Tictrac to adapt itself to people's life projects. Users have the ability to create any project they like on Tictrac. These projects are nothing more than collections of the different trackers or services organised in the way that best suits the needs of the individual user."
We had a poke around inside the closed beta, but until all of the services are implemented it's hard to judge the platform fully.
We could pull in our Gmail data, Klout score, weather data, tweets and Runkeeper stats, but there are still 28 services that have yet to be implemented, each with anywhere from two to 30 types of data to track. The real value will come from being able to aggregate all of the feeds we create.
It's clear that there could be a real draw for fitness fiends and parents wanting to monitor the progress of their babies, but some may shudder at the thought of this continuing through to school age to include class reports and sporting achievements --
Tictrac is pushy parent crack. There's a slogan for them.
It will be at least another 8-10 weeks before Tictrac's beta opens publicly, but we'll review it properly when it does.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
