I twitter quite a lot. Amongst the trivia I tweet a lot of potentially useful information. If I twitter my lunch (as I often do) wouldn’t it be cool to be able to chart and graph that information? Find out how often I had chicken this month? Of course it would!
That’s what datatoy does.
Try it out
Just fire up Twitter and follow @datatoy - we’ll follow you back in order to track your tweets.
So lets say you are training for a 100km bike ride. You want to log all your training via twitter, and see it collected into a nice table and a nice chart. To log your 20 mile ride this morning just tweet:
*training 20 miles
You don’t need to set up “training”, tell us what “miles” are or even visit this site before sending the tweet. Just make sure @datatoy is following you first. We’ll automatically log your data, create the charts and graphs, and create a new profile page for you.
In this case “training” is what we call a collection, so you need the * immediately before the word. You can have as many collections as you like.
(NOTE - No spaces or underscores or anything allowed in collection names at the moment - so use “biketraining” not “bike_training” or “bike training”.)
Now visit datatoy.net/user/your_twitter_name and you’ll see your new charts.
The tweet formats
Until our full on natural language tweet eater is working, you need to clutter your tweets a little. If that’s not for you then just follow datatoy on twitter and we’ll tell you when they disappear.
*lunch tuna sandwich
This will create a “lunch” collecton and mark todays lunch as a tuna sandwich.
*lunch tuna sandwich !low fat mayo tho
This will also add a note about low fat mayo.
*lunch 3 tuna sandwiches !full fat mayo too
If you got greedy we have that covered too.
*bike ?total
Get a quick reminder of your total mileage, number of snacks, whatever…
*bike ?latest
Get a quick reminder of the details of your latest entry
Hide those tweets?
If you don’t want to freak out your followers with how many times a day you visit starbucks, or scare them with all those * codes don’t worry.
These patterns work just as well when you start your message with @datatoy or d datatoy .
LS 10:35 am on May 25, 2009 Permalink
Hi,
How do I delete a chart that I do not want anymore?
Thanks,
LS
admin 11:09 am on May 25, 2009 Permalink
You can hide a chart from your profile using something like
d datatoy *coffee ?hideme. This removes the collection from your own pages, and from any group pages for that term.
This will be joined shortly by a similar ?tag (most likely ?purge) which will fully remove your data for that collection from the system.
Steve 10:52 am on May 27, 2009 Permalink
With tweets like “*drink coffee instant” and “*drink coffee latte”, is it possible to get a graph of all coffee against others, rather than separating out the different types of coffee?
Thanks,
Steve.
admin 10:59 am on May 27, 2009 Permalink
Hi Steve - Always good to get feedback from the caffeinated! I actually have something like this on the list. My concept was to allow grouping to be suggested by datatoy and confirmed by the user.
Let’s say you drink ‘coffee instant’, ‘coffee latte’, ‘coffee’, ‘tea’ and ‘OJ’. Datatoy will soon have the option to show you 3 coffee, 1 tea, 1 OJ.
One step further, it will show ‘4 with caffeine, 1 without’. You could then tell it that the coffees and the tea are “hot” and the OJ “cold” if that’s important to you.
I’ll post later in the week with an expected launch date of that feature.
Steve 11:06 am on May 27, 2009 Permalink
Excellent! Thank you. Always looking for ways to make sure I don’t get too much blood in my caffeine stream…
Steve.
Steve 9:30 am on May 28, 2009 Permalink
Another question - is it possible to add the ability to rename data tags? I’d quite like to switch my “coffee kenco” data points to “coffee instant”.
admin 10:18 am on May 28, 2009 Permalink
Hi Steve. Not yet, but good news. There are two features here which should be released next week. The first is a rename or remove function for individual entries. The other allows multiple collections to be unified. For example if you accidentally log *drinks and *drink - it will pull both together into a single *drinks collection. Some of this will be browser based some via tweets. I’ll DM you when they go live.
Steve 3:21 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink
Perfect. This is getting very good, very quickly. And the website works great on an iPhone, too (no Flash rubbish:-) - is that by design?
admin 3:29 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink
Thanks for the nice comment Steve - always nice to hear. Keeping the site ‘friendly’ to iPhone, Android etc… is a big consideration for me. I tweet through a browser on my phone rather than by SMS so it’s only natural to want to check my charts there too.
Making these devices work through reasonable adherence to standards, rather than by building separate apps seems the way to go. m.datatoy.net might come along soon to make a few css tweaks for easier handheld browsing. All simple stuff like single column layouts and shorter menus.