Friction, Baby.

I’ve personally tried at least a half-dozen of these tools, including DailyBurn, FitDay, Traineo, SparkPeople, and the Daily Plate. They’ve each got their strengths and weaknesses — some focusing more on diet, some on exercise, and others on building a community to support you in your Quest For Better Health™. However, they all suffer from the same fatal flaw: They’re too much work.

All of these web apps want me to sit down at a computer to enter every piece of food I eat and every exercise I do. This isn’t a big deal when you’re sitting in front of a screen during the work day, but it’s a huge inconvenience when you can’t get to a web browser for awhile. Spend one weekend out of town and away from a computer, and the thought of logging three days worth of snacks and meals at once will be enough for you to say “screw it” and call it quits.

And ironically, logging your food intake on these sites is even more work if you choose to eat healthy by making your own meals and avoiding processed foods. Because, while processed and franchise restaurant items are almost certainly already in these sites’ databases, there’s a good chance you’ll need to manually add the individual ingredients if you’re trying a new recipe for dinner.

Striking a Balance

Detailed data is nice, but it’s not necessary. If you look at the study above on food diaries, you’ll see that the key was not calorie counting, but becoming more aware of what you’re eating. So, I think a compromise is in order: Instead of tracking just a couple of things in depth, record more items in less detail using a method that has zero friction in its usage. I’ve found just such a solution in your.flowingdata.

your.flowingdata is a project created by UCLA graduate student Nathan Yau, author of the FlowingData data visualization blog. This deceptively simple application makes use of Twitter direct messages to log your data, which means you can do it anytime, anywhere from your phone.

Anytime you want to record something it’s as simple as:

d yfd ate banana

The beautiful thing about your.flowingdata that I didn’t completely grasp at first is that you can use it to literally record anything. Food intake, weight, sleep, how much TV you watch, how many times you go to the bathroom, whatever. You can keep track of it as long as you can convey what you want using the simple message syntax:

action [value] [unit] [timestamp]

Since I started sending the application data on November 4th, I’ve logged over 345 items, including 22 weight measurements that create this nice scatter plot graph (notice how it’s trending down…):

And, it highlights the fact that I haven’t gotten to bed before midnight since I started recording data, and that my shortest night of sleep was just last night (less than four hours, due to an early-waking toddler).

Sure, some of the things I’m currently tracking may turn out to be of dubious value. But because logging actions is so easy, there’s really no downside. And who knows — as I accumulate data over time, it might become even more valuable and highlight some trend I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

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More and more, I’m beginning to think that our success as a nation — and as a species on this planet — depends on us looking back to our ancestors for wisdom and insight for survival. And, I think that will lead us to one overarching theme: Decentralization.

As the human race became more modern and industrialized, it optimized almost every for low cost by pursuing “economies of scale”. Which means, in a nutshell, that it makes more economical sense for a small number of large firms to produce something than for lots of small ones to pursue the same goal. The market seems to have this embedded as a form of Darwinian survival of the fittest — weak, poor performing companies fail, while the successful ones grow until there is either a natural monopoly or, more likely, an oligopoly.

You can observe this in practically every industry. It’s why we have Microsoft, the Big Three automakers, and Walmart. It’s also why we now have an infinite number of niches that monopolized by an infinite number of businesses. Anyone for high-end discount (Target), organic groceries (Whole Foods), or technology books with cute animals on their covers (O’Reilly Media)?

One of the problems with concentrating too much market power in the hands of a few companies is one we witnesses just a few months ago with American banks– the Too Big to Fail phenomenon. Which actually means, as we’ve seen, that these huge corporations are not so big that they can’t fail, but that they’re too big for us to let fail. Hindsight now tells us that we shouldn’t blindly trust the market leaders of any industry, be it banking, automotive, retail, food, or energy. In other words, no business should be too big to fail.

Other, different examples of the perils of centralized power can be seen in the energy and food industries. Sure, it costs less to produce both of these in a few big spots (power plants, feed lots, etc.), but it creates plenty of problems too. Fewer, bigger power plants increase the chances of a catastrophic outage that affects large numbers of people and larger feed lots, slaughterhouses, and food plants exponentially increase the chance that food-born disease is spread to lots of customers in a large geographic area.

Less obvious are the transportation costs. Moving large amounts of grain and livestock hundreds or thousands of miles isn’t cheap, nor is shipping back the processed meats, breakfast cereal, or produce. Same goes for electricity. More energy output is required to transport it over longer distances, since resistance gradually reduces the available power.

To me, this all points to a move back toward decentralization. More, smaller power plants closer to consumers — including at the building level itself with solar, wind, geothermal, cogeneration, and other power generation technologies. For food, it could mean the return of small farms that grow a variety of livestock and crops, a flourishing local market, and possibly a vegetable garden in everyone’s backyard. It could also mean the return of machine shops and a real manufacturing industry in the USA.

Decentralization isn’t necessarily the low cost way to organize a system, but what it lacks in monetary savings it makes up in flexibility and the ability to survive a catastrophic failure. Taking Google’s various services as an example, it hosts everything on multiple server farms, each containing hundreds or thousands of individual servers. One or a dozen servers can (and sometimes do) fail at any given time, but because their system is so widely distributed and redundant, it doesn’t matter. Failure is isolated, and the damage (if any) is limited.

So, in the future, we might need to start becoming generalists again out of necessity. The days of just accountant will be gone, replaced by accountant, farmer, energy producer, and more. In other words, the Maker/DIYer will be King.

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Prior to the internet, video games, TiVo, Netflix, podcasts, Youtube, and cable television, it was the norm to have TV shows that everyone watched and discussed the next day. Just 10 years ago we shared Seinfeld and Friends, but now our attention is fractured among an infinity number of entertainment options. For example, among my family and friends, I can only think of a handful of people who watch even one of my other favorite shows (Heroes, Chuck, 30 Rock, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, The Simpsons, and Pushing Daisies). There are just so many ways to be entertained that you can’t possibly keep up — even with the good stuff.

That’s why I feel The Office is so special. Somehow, it manages to transcend everything else competing for our attention to create a shared experience every Thursday evening. That’s pretty impressive, considering the current state of entertainment, and speaks volumes about the appeal of original, well written television.

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For example, I this little sign is posted at every fuel pump at one of the local BP stations:

The sign gets its point across, but the language is extremely accusatory and negative, complete with multiple exclamation points, red lettering, and UPPERCASE YELLING. It almost seems like the station is assuming the worst of its customers.

It’s obvious this was quickly thrown together by a manager or employee annoyed by this reoccurring situation. I can appreciate their frustration, but this note is written from their viewpoint, not the customer’s. Writing something like the following might take an extra minute or two just to get the wording right, but it gets the point across without treating the customers like crap: “Please come see us inside if your receipt doesn’t print. This credit card reader could be having problems.”

So, you get the same end result (customer comes inside the store), but with a much different tone. It’s the classic, “It’s not you. It’s me.” Who cares if it’s not really the machine that has a problem? Being right isn’t what’s important. Completing the transaction while respecting the customer is.

It’s very easy to forget that something small like this note on a fuel pump is a piece of marketing. Everything a business communicates is marketing, for better or worse. Keeping that in mind, it’s not only important what you say, but how it’s said.

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4. Here’s an Idea: Customer Service Callbacks
5. Quick Look: Citizen Marketers — When People are the Message

Having said that, there is one easy thing they can do to make me happy: After I’ve initiated a service request/question, let me know that you’re working on it. And I don’t mean one of those canned auto-response emails that I often get after submitting an email to a business. I’m talking about a short reply from a real person when they start working on my issue. Or, if there’s a back log of other problems or a delay in resolving mine, just say so. I can respect, and even tolerate that. Just don’t keep me in the dark.

I say this after faxing some papers to our mortgage lender earlier today. I have no idea if they’re working on my problem, when I can expect resolution, or if they received the fax in the first place. It’s like sending something into a black hole.

What do you think? Am I asking too much of businesses? Keeping customers up-to-date seems like something really easy, but I don’t come across many companies that actually do it…

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Search sites such as Google and Technorati let me enter a search query and then subscribe to its results in my RSS reader (Bloglines in my case). Anytime something new is found, I’m notified in my reader, all without me visiting the site or manually performing the search.

I can’t think of any technical reason why the same idea can’t be applied to searches for vehicles, houses, or anything else that has structured data. Please: Just let me pick a price range and any options I’m looking for (number of bedrooms and bathrooms, ZIP code, square footage, etc.) and subscribe to the search results. Don’t make me visit your site everytime I want to see what’s new — bring the updates to me!

Maybe these options already exist on some sites, but I haven’t seen it personally yet. If you know of any that let me save and subscribe to my searches, please let me know!

There are two kinds of people in the world:

1. Those who have more time than money.
2. Those who have more money than time.

For most of human history, the majority of people have fallen into the first group. We grew our own food, made our own clothes, and sometimes even built our own homes. The 20th century marked the turning point in the United States, with more and more people moving into group number two. Incomes rose dramatically, corporations offered inexpensive and accessible products to mass audiences, and new technology created new ways to communication and be entertained: radio, television, the personal computer, etc.

Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, we’re drowning in a sea of choices. Daily, we’re faced with so much media and information that we cannot possibly consume it all. There are enough television programs, books, music albums, blogs, video games, movies, podcasts, newspapers, and magazines to occupy dozens or hundreds of lifetimes. We have more commitments and obligations than we have hours in the day, often leaving us precious little time to spend with the people we love.

The simple fact is, incomes will continue to rise, but our time on Earth is limited and unknown. We can’t add more hours to the day, but we can make the best use of our time and attention in a couple of ways. First, we can become more productive, meaning we can spend less time working (this includes your job and your other obligations) and more time enjoying life. My current favorite system for doing this is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s a simple yet powerful approach to overcoming the information overload we each face.

The other thing we can do is trade some of our hard-earned cash for products and services that help us make better use of our time. This is a wide category, including everything from eating out at restuarants, to TiVoing shows so you can watch them at your convenience, to hiring someone to mow your lawn or do your taxes. If you stop and think about it, a growing percentage of our purchases is being taken up by things we could do ourselves, but that we decide to outsource to a specialist.

Here in lies the business opportunity. Take a look at your daily life, and that of those close to you. What common tasks do you still do that might instead be done better/faster/more cheaply if you passed them off to someone else? Where could you apply some sort of filter to help you get only the information/media you want? Is there anyway to time or place shift your tasks, hobbies, and entertainment so that it’s your decision when and where they’re done?

Here are some examples that might get your brain going:

• Services like Dream Dinners where you create your meals in a single session then freeze them at home until you’re ready to eat.
• At home grocery delivery
• Music filtering/suggestion services such as Pandora that help you discover new music without a lot of time or effort
• Podcasts and audio books that let you make the most of your commute or workout time
• TiVo and other devices that allow you to watch your favorite media when you want, regardless of the schedule
• Retirement accounts that automatically adjust their mutual fund allocation over time as you approach retirement, instead of having to do it yourself every year
• Software or services that can offer suggestions and recommendations based on past purchases or what others like you have purchased

This is just a short list that I came up with in a couple of minutes. The opportunities are limited only by your imagination. They’re there, you just need to find the idea and then execute it!

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