So earlier this week, Dave and I were published in a lifetracking/streaming article (thanks to sweet friends Brynn and Chris) in the Washington Post called Bytes of Life. We thought our conference call with reporter Monica Hesse went pretty well, but neither of us expected to get the kind of coverage we did for talking about a little statistics app we’re working on that we’ve tentatively called I Did Stuff, which is basically a combination of every good idea we’ve had in the last year.

The premise for I Did Stuff lies in the belief that we’re tracking so many aspects of our life now that computers need to not only make sense of this data for our own use, but also use it to deliver status on demand. One common example I’ve used is that of the “reverse twitter”…basically to combine Google calendar, IM status, and whole host of other data sources into one remotely queryable interface. And anyone can ask this interface “Where is Dave?” and receive a response like “Well he isn’t in front of IM, but he has class in 10 minutes, so he might be in transit. But his phone is on the charger, so he either forgot his phone or is oversleeping.”

Which was a great idea a year ago, and as far as I know still hasn’t been done. But since then, this idea has grown into so much more. Not only do we want to create an AI who can infer status for others, we want it to learn more about us than we know ourselves.

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Due to EntreCard employees and/or top users acting like little shits in the comments to this post about similar-but-less–of-a-pita competitor Spottt, Arrington has now banned at least one user from commenting and appears to have all comments containing "entrecard" exiled to the depths of a moderation queue (which my own response was relegated to for a while, but obviously rang of pure and unbiased truth and was approved).

Don’t get me wrong, despite today’s public display of immaturity, I have nothing against EntreCard.  They are pretty damn useful for people who have some spare time and don’t mind exploring lots of blogs.  And right now, that’s just not me.

So how did my EntreCard experiment go?  Here’s a screenshot of my stats:

I visited 151 sites, received 161 clicks (18 of which were from my paid ads), and sent out 45 clicks to other sites.  I have seen an increase in comments, but mostly on my EntreCard related posts.  My EC worth has been going up faster after moving from the more densely populated Internet category to Fashion (making tech "look good"…hey, it could work), but I don’t want to position myself that way other than experimentally.

Verdict:  You get out what you put in, and my time is now more scarce than my money.

Today I decided that having a perfectly accurate timeline in my flickr photostream really doesn’t matter as much as I originally thought it did.  I’ve got thousands of future sets on my hard drive that aren’t completely finished (like umm, Defcon 15), but many of them are ready to upload.  I couldn’t think of any real gain to sit on them, and I actually ended up realizing that it’s better not to upload giant sets at once. 

Think about it…after receiving a notification that you’ve uploaded new photos, people only have so much attention before they’re forced to focus on other tasks.  No matter how awesome each shot is in your 500 image set, most contacts will be overwhelmed by the amount of content you just threw at them.  Uploading fewer images at once gives people more time to actually notice and absorb your work, which will increase the number of individual views and comments. 

So what’s the "magic upload number"?  I’ve got my photostream set up for small images + sets, which puts 16 images per page.  Right now I’m aiming for 20-25, which gives me plenty of leeway to experiment in the 1 - 2 pages range.