Syncing Up Life - The Experiment Begins
In this age of 30+ applications on your iPhone, hundreds of browser bookmarks, rss readers with tens of feeds, multiple email accounts, multiple calendars, and more, I've found myself hoping for a better way to sync it all up.
One of the reasons Facebook is so popular is that they have become the de facto aggregator of your social life online. Nevertheless, you still use LinkedIn for aggregating your business network. And much of the time, you get evites instead of Facebook event invites. You post some photos to Flickr and some videos to YouTube and Vimeo. Sometimes you buy things from Amazon, sometimes on eBay, and many times from specialty online retailers. You watch videos on Hulu, network websites, YouTube, and from random links your friends forward. You have sites that you visit for keeping up with your hobbies. God knows where you keep your to-do lists. The simple truth is that the Internet has succeed in allowing us to handle much more data than we used to, but it's getting so distributed that it can feel unmanageable. Some companies like Google, Evernote or Springpad try to help you organize your life. The problem is that many of these services end up becoming just another site you have to visit to get the whole picture.
I've decided to use my expertise in Ruby on Rails to develop my own personal website to organize and sync up my life. I plan to start with the basics and eventually achieve a cohesive site that organizes and displays all the information I have to try to hold in my head right now. While the data will be completely tailored to me and my life, I hope to architect the application such that it could be used by just about anyone.
It's an ambitious goal, but I'm motivated to give it a shot and see what happens. If you have any ideas or input, you can leave a comment here, post it to my Facebook wall, email it to me, text it to me, or give me a call : )
