And Now For Something Different….

I recently received an email from my “techie” son who lives in Amsterdam, explaining an app that he has developed. It sounds very cool to his non-tech mother, and I thought I’d take a vacation from what increasingly seems like a funeral for American democracy, and share his explanation of it. Perhaps the biggest “plus” is that the app allows users to withdraw their data from increasingly toxic social network platforms…

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A few months ago, I was looking at one of those apps that shows you a map of the world, and you add places you’ve been and it puts dots on the map. I have always loved these kinds of visualisations because I have traveled a lot and like to see at a glance where I have been. But when I started thinking about it, I realised that these apps are pretty limited, and it would be kind of cool to do more than just show dots on a map, it would be great to connect those dots to real experiences I had at those locations. What was I posting on social media at the time, for example?

Since I am a developer, I decided to build a little site that would map where I had been and attach it to those experiences, but that meant I would need to collect this data from wherever it was scattered around the internet. I maintained a blog between 2006-2015, but I removed it from the internet a long time ago, so the first step was for me to find that data and import it, which wasn’t too difficult. Then I started thinking about other places I have posted over the years, like Facebook and Instagram. (I never go on Facebook anymore as I absolutely detest what it has become. It used to be a place to connect with friends and now it is pure slop being pushed at me that has nothing to do with the people I care about, to say nothing of the fact that I think Zuckerberg and other tech titans are evil and I don’t want to contribute one iota more to their success with my data.)

Fortunately the EU has passed data privacy and ownership laws that force these sites to give you your data back when requested. So that is what I did. I requested and downloaded my data and imported it into my map app, linking items to the photos and posts related to these places.

As I was looking at the map, I realised I wanted other ways to look at my data, so I built a cool timeline that you can zip through very easily to go to any date and see what you were doing and what was happening on that date. And then I built a tag view to group things by subject matter. I showed it to a few people who were very interested and asked if I could make a site like that for them, and suggested that I make an app out of it. So that is what I did. For the next few months I spent many hours refining my app, adding many kinds of information that one could choose to import (such as travel itineraries, blogs, social media sources, resumes, and more).

I just launched the first version of this in the App Store for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and soon will have the Android version available in the Google Play store.

What I love about this is that all the content I placed on the internet in various places over the years is mine again, and I can peruse that entire history in one place, and share just the parts of it I want to (there is a built-in sharing part as well). I got to take back my data and can now completely delete Facebook or others if I want. If you want to check it out, you can go to https://lifevis.app to read about it and follow links to the App Store versions from there. Or here is a direct link to the app store versions.

Here are a few screenshots with example data: