aprilzero

such a nice tumblr theme

So excited to start sharing this. If you're a new user and prompted for an invite code, use "makingof"

No, that music listening we are getting from Spotify through Facebook. The app info is from Rescuetime though.

This was a really fun project. We weren't actually planning to do any annual reports, but over the break I was digging through my own data and there were a few things I wanted to see.

Few days later we had a basic page and figured might as well release it for everyone. Hopefully you will find it interesting.

We were very inspired by things like the Feltron Annual Report & Jehiah's Annual Report. Seems like something people and companies have been doing for a long time already, so lots of examples to continue from.

my point was we're working now to try to figure out the right mechanism — whether it is pro subscriptions or selling hardware, etc. — so we don't end up in a position where we'll need to sell data later.

iPhones for the past few years have actually been tracking steps and other data in the background & storing it in Healthkit. You won't be able to get heart rate, but a lot of our views can be powered with just software.

Our new healthkit app (gyrosco.pe/app, currently in beta) loads steps from the iPhone, and we also integrate with other apps like Moves which also run on the phone.

The idea is you can get started within just a few minutes and not need to buy anything. We can also backfill the last year of data so you don't start with an empty site. Then you can start to add hardware to get more data you care about, like a wifi scale or heart rate monitor.

There are many other apps that also write to healthkit, like sleep tracking apps Sleep++ / Sleep Cycle, which will then show up.

Thanks!

First of all, we're not selling any data, nor do we ever plan to. We do make money by offering a pro subscription--this new design is one of the features, along with things like custom domains and access to our Healthkit app. We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data".

We believe that sharing of this data is an important part of the experience for most people. Of course you don't have to, but for many people that is the first thing they want to do. Perhaps only with your family or a few close friends, and not the whole world, but a single-player experience that only exists on your device would be missing many of the experiences that we think are core to Gyroscope.

A small percent of users have made their profiles public, and many of those have set up a custom domain name and are very excited about sharing it and having a personal website that reflects who they are. Having the data in the cloud makes that use-case possible, though of course doesn't require it.

Our new mobile apps are also taking a slightly different approach, where all of the source data is private but allows for curation and customization, and you can export individual images with aspects that you want people to be able to see. I think that will be the right balance of privacy and control for most people, while still allowing sharing of things they want to highlight.

Making my account completely public has been an interesting experiment. When I first did it last year, I wasn't sure what to expect. Overall it has been very positive experience, and my current opinion is that more transparency is generally good. The location data is probably the most sensitive out of all the things we track. For other people, weight or age have been concerns, and we've added settings to fully hide those.

There are things I consider very private and wouldn't want anyone else to see — like my messages, emails, finances, etc. — but I am personally happy to release the data on the site, like what my heart rate is or how much I slept yesterday. That balance will vary for everyone, which is why I have been experimenting mostly on myself before recommending things to others.

The location data is probably the most sensitive, and we've been playing around with other themes that show different combinations of data and keep more of that private.

We might add other login options in the future, but currently we've found Facebook to be a great experience because we can boot up your basic account info (timezone, name, cover photo, age, etc.) without needing all that to be manually entered. It would be a terrible experience if the first 5 minutes on Gyroscope were just spent typing in basic facts about yourself. One of our big challenges with Gyroscope is how to passively power all this stuff without creating any more work for the user. Our goal has been to go through the whole experience without ever needing to use your keyboard to type anything, maybe with the exception of setting your username.