This week it’s all about you. Yep, I have two services that address two different aspects of our lives: What we do and what risks we take.
Tracking what we personally do is something that people becomes easily addicted to. A recent Wired article, “The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics” discussed the surprising success that Nike has had with the Nike+ system that allows an individual to record the statistics on their running.
It turns out that collecting your own stats and logging them on Nike’s Web site has become a phenomenon: “Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled — more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.”
It turns out that when people can easily gather the data that characterizes their lives the allure of being able to easily store it and analyze it is enormous. Enter Daytum, a Web service that provides a means to do just that allowing you to record and list, graph, and tabulate any kind of data you like.
Whether it’s tracking your kid’s football stats or tracking your calorie consumption, Daytum has (to riff on the iPhone) a way to do that. In fact, you can enter data not only using the Web interface but also from mobile devices through Daytum’s iPhone or Android optimized Web interfaces. You can also submit entries via Twitter.
You can create categories for your entries then graph your collected data as bar graphs, sprarklines, stacked graphs, timelines and pie charts. You can also create reports and several kinds of summaries and keep your data private or make it public.
This service is a great idea and sports a very nice visual design and while it provides the ability to download your data in CSV format Daytum lacks one thing that would make it really powerful and compelling: There is no API. The lack of a mechanism for integration with applications and other Web services is an odd oversight given the obvious amount of attention to detail that has gone into Daytum.
Daytum is available as a free service with limited data items, number of displays, and number of categories and with no privacy controls while the Daytum Plus service, priced at $4 per month, allows you to record an unlimited number of items in an unlimited number of categories.
My other focus answers a different question, what are the risks in your life? For example, did you know that the odds an NFL pass will be intercepted are 1 in 31.52? Or how about the odds of a December airline flight having a delayed arrival are 1 in 3.23?
That’s what the Book of Odds can help you with. So, given that Tiger Woods’ misdeeds are so much in the news at the moment you might wonder what the odds are of a spouse cheating. The answer is a surprisingly high 1 in 4.76.
The data provided by the Book of Odds are professionally researched and sources are always quoted and the service adds an interesting personalization dimension to this: You can create a free account and collect the odds that describe you.
You can also share odds with other people by e-mail, tweeting, Facebook, Digg, or Stumbleupon, rate those you find useful and or interesting, and suggest odds that you’d like to see included. And if you find an odds statement that is particularly interesting you can click on a button and buy a T-shirt printed with that statistic.
Another neat feature of the Book of Odds is the visual browser that provides a graphical tool for exploring the various categories.
The service also suggests that you can “learn to calibrate risk” which I suppose is true to some extent although I’m not sure how practical and useful it is to know that while cycling I run a 1 in 74.12 chance of getting injured.
The Book of Odds is, however, fascinating and somewhat addictive (did you know that the odds that an NFL pass will be incomplete are 1 in 2.49 or that there’s 1 in 38.68 chance that a football player will be injured while playing football over a year?).
I’m not sure whether there’s a profitable business in this service given the tiny amount of advertising shown and the potential revenue from selling T-shirts and the size of the research staff (according to the company’s blog, there’s 25 people working full time) but there’s no doubt that it’s a fascinating and rather addictive service. The chances I’ll be going back to check out the odds of something this week are exactly 1 in 1.
