I have recently started tracking my geographic location, with the intent of keeping an automatic log of where I am, ideally for the rest of my life. I have no idea how long I’ll realistically be able to keep this updated, but I figure “forever” sounds like a good goal.
Method
I just got my very first Blackberry (the Curve), which has built-in GPS. The first thing I wanted to figure out (after getting gmail on the phone) was how to store position reports automatically. There are a few pieces of software that sort of do this, although some applications store the position logs locally on the SD memory card, which you then download to your computer. There are also some subscription-based services catered more toward enterprise-level fleet management that do way more than I need (TeleNav Track, Accutracking) . The SD card approach is no good for me. I’m lazy, and I know there’s no way I’m ever going to transfer the position log from my phone to my computer. The subscription service is a bit more realistic (Accutracking even has a REST API), but I’m not excited about having to keep a subscription paid and active and rely on someone else for my reports. The only real workable solution was to find an application that automatically sent the position information to a web server, and ideally to my own webserver so I can have full control over the data.
Enter Mologogo. Mologogo is a free application and service for GPS-enabled phones that does exactly what I wanted. It runs automatically every few minutes (mine’s set to run every 5 minutes) and sends your position report to the Mologogo online service, which keeps track of your points. That’s halfway to what I needed. The icing on the cake is that the Mologogo application has an awesome feature that lets you set your own URL that the service will also send the position report to. Bingo. This lets you save your position reports in your own database to do whatever you want. I grabbed some of the sample PHP code from the Mologogo wiki and installed it on my personal web server. After configuring the Mologogo Blackberry app I was getting position reports logged in my database.
Why?
This is not about showing where I am in real-time. This is not about “life-streaming” or “life casting” or whatever the current buzzwords are for letting strangers watch every moment of your life. I do not plan on showing my current location on my blog, or letting people see exactly where I am as I’m there. I’m not going to do that for a few reasons, and privacy is one of them I guess, although I’m not really freaked out about the idea of having my current location be public knowledge. The main reason is that I think that stuff is boring as hell. I watched Justin.tv for all of about 5 minutes, and the entire draw of that kind of lifecasting is the hope that the person you’re watching is going to do something stupid, which usually happens specifically because they’re living to entertain their audience. Other people (in fact most of the people who use Mologogo I assume) like the concept of simply letting people see their latest position reports. But why? I don’t find the idea of viewing where some random guy (or even a good friend) is at the current instant compelling. I suppose if all my friends automatically told me where they were that could be kind of cool and helpful for meeting up. But whatever, that’s semi-useful and still boring.
This is about analyzing historical data. It’s about the visualization of years, the visualization of decades. It’s about being able to see the geographic context of my life. I probably won’t do anything with this data for a year or two. It only becomes truly valuable after extended periods of time.
To try to think about how much data we’re talking about here’s the approximate math:
1 report every 5 minutes = 12 reports an hour = 288 reports a day = 105,120 reports a year = 1 million reports a decade
So theoretically let’s say I can somehow figure out how to actually do this constantly until I’m 80 years old. That would be about 5 and a half million records that would catalog my movement around the world for most of my life. That amount of data is already easy to store online. I can store millions of records like this in an inexpensive hosted database, ideally duplicated in multiple locations for redundancy. So the challenge isn’t about how to store the data, it’s about what to do with it, and that’s where it starts to get fun.
Visualizing the geospatial context of life
The important things in your life have a geographic context. Moving to a new city, changing jobs (even if that just means a slightly different commute), traveling on vacation, etc etc. The geographic movements of your life are directly tied to meaningful experiences. Being able to visualize those movements is like having a picture of a certain time of your life.
I wish I had the data for the past few years. It would have shown me in college, then moving to San Francisco. I could have seen the daily commute I did for a few years, and then the change to working from home. Imagine a heatmap on a map showing where I spend my time. While I was commuting to work you would have been able to make out the route of the train I took every day, and the amount of time I spent simply getting to and from the office. Compare that with my current lifestyle, which now involves either working from my home or my girlfriend’s place, which would also show a kind of “commute”, but this one is very different. This commute represent a shift in where I spend my time, and even beyond showing a change in my work life, it also signifies the strengthening of our romantic relationship. This is a visual representation of a very meaningful part of my life. Being able to visually see this movement is a way to quantify important changes. I imagine creating some amazing looking visual images of this type of data and hanging them on the wall. A single image would represent so much.
Challenges
The biggest challenge is going to be keeping new data updated and old data accessible as technology changes. In another year or two I will have a different mobile device, at which point I’ll have to figure out how to use the new device to keep the position reports updated. In another ten years who knows what kind of device I might be carrying around in my pocket. There’s just no way to predict that kind of stuff. So every few years I’ll have to figure out how to keep my reports updated using new technology. I’ll also have to adapt to changes in how I store that data. Storing it in a database works well now, but inevitably I’ll have to migrate that data from one database to another, or even move from a relational database to some other form of storage. This means I’ve got to either stay geeky enough to know how to implement this stuff for the rest of my life, or I’ve got to figure out a solution that literally requires no changes for the next few decades (I don’t think this is at all possible).
There are also some more immediate challenges. I don’t know how to keep my positions logged as I travel internationally yet. Even as I’m in the US I’ve got to ensure that the logging software is always running on my phone. My phone needs to be on at all times for the reports to come in. Ideally I’m going to try to write my own custom software to do exactly what I want, just so I know how it works under the hood in case something breaks or I upgrade devices. I’m not stoked about the fact that I’m tied to software written by someone else. I’ve also obviously got to keep the webserver that receives the reports up and running at all times. I’ll probably try to move to more of a database in the cloud approach using Amazon SimpleDB and EC2 so I can rely on Amazon instead of my current web host (I imagine I’ll always be relying on some company to handle this kind of stuff).
I’m excited about the possibilities for using this data in a few years, I just hope I can keep the position feed coming in.
