Okay, so this is a brief idea that can help society manage their time. You see, people only manage money money money. However, I never see software that manages time time time. I think time is more important than money and not all actions within a time is based all about money (but in this non-personal world, we really want to do everything to relate heavily with money). Do you see budget applications that creates a pie chart of what you will do based on time per year instead of your income per year? Money is a subset of time, not all our life is involved with money. Whoever made the definition "time is money", they are completely wrong. It is a wrong over generalization that does not describe how real life is.
So what is my idea? To incorporate a web activity log. No, I am not talking about web history. I am really talking about a real web activity log. What this web activity log will look like? It will look like this.
Thursday April 22
Summary
Spent 2 hours on Website A
Spent 3 hours on Website B
Spent 4 hours on Website C
Amount of time spent on Typing: 3 hours
Amount of time spent on Reading: 6 hours
Total hours spent on Web: 9 hours
And that is just the summary version. The detail version will have a timeline like as follows.
Details of Thursday April 22
8:00 AM- 9:00 AM on Website A reading
9:20 AM - 11:20 AM on Website B reading
11:20 AM - 12:20 PM on Website C reading
1:00 PM- 2:00 PM on Website A reading
2:00 PM- 3:00 PM on Website B reading
3:00 PM- 6:00 PM on Website C writing
Another thing is we can see labels instead of individual websites. Lets say we label website A and B for entertainment and website C for work.
Summary
Spent 5 hours on Entertainment
- Spent 5 hours on Reading Entertainment
- Spent 1 hours on Reading Work
- Spent 3 hours on Writing Work
Amount of time spent on Reading: 6 hours
Total hours spent on Web: 9 hours
I assume you can imagine how the details will be if we use labels instead of individual websites.
Okay, in addition, we can include charts and graphs for a day, week, month based on all our activity, based on a specific website or based on labels, based on reading or writing. This can help us then to measure our productivity: where to spend more or less time, where to be more faster or slower, and so on. The charts can include other users as well (you can import them). That way you can compare the performance or lifestyle of other users. The imagination of this program can go into much much more details, but this is just the first prototype of the implemented design will be.
How to determine if a user is idle is pretty simple. The timer will count as long the browser is focused (if it is minimized or not in focus as the user is using another application besides his browser, then that specified time will not be counted). If the user is focused on the browser without moving anything for more than 10 minutes, then the timer will not count the last 10 minutes. Instead, it will count only 1 minute of those 10 minutes and will take the rest of the minutes as idle until the user "moves anything". I define "moves anything" as when the user scrolls a page, clicks a link or buttons on a website, or types anything in the form. The user can use a shortcut hot key that will be a switch to override this rule (I have not seen people staring a screen for more than 10 minutes, but it is not hard to imagine). When a user types something in a website, it will switch to writing instead of reading state. If there is no writing after 60 seconds, it will automatically switch to reading.
So we have 3 states we have to record
- Idle
- Reading
- Writing
And that is basically the gist of it. Okay, no, we are not done yet. We missed an important aspect of this. Security of course. The data collected will be stored on the user's computer. It is up to the user whether he wants to upload that data to the server so he can sync his log on other devices as well. In terms of how easy to implement: It is easy to implement it in systems that are more open. For devices like the iPhone, that may be more challenging unless it is jail broken. In true essence, this application should not actually be a universal app, but an app that all browser companies will incorporate it in their browser. Do you see browser history on each browser? They all are similar in some way or another. They incorporated it because they know how important it is. However, I see many benefits making this as a universal app. Adding charts and so many options to it will make it more special than a simple browser incorporating it (it will have less features if the browser itself develops it alone). In addition, given that all companies collect the browser history of every user, they can create their own graphs and speculations already. In other words, this software is more oriented for the user instead of a website business organization. We will also have the option whether the stats of the web activity log of the user to be automatically deleted or not when the user deletes his cache history of the browser. There will always be the option for the user to delete manually his stats of his web activity log through the original application. There will always be options to set what data the application can collect (there will be a simple and advanced version user interface for the user to use when changing those options).
Okay, that is all. Some of those ideas may be possible or not possible to be implemented at this moment. However, if most are capable to be implemented for now, it can become a very useful application oriented for the average web user (especially for those individuals that crunch a lot of their time within social web sites. Sometimes, they will never believe they spent a lot of time in a social website unless you state it as a fact like this software will do). Most of the concerns for this software will be the privacy and security of their private stored information. There will be a lot of contract agreements they must read and agree to the extent of liability we will not hold accountable. However, on the other hand, we will do the most to collect the least personal, they will have the ability to choose whether the content will be uploaded on the servers, and so on. We will give them their freedom what to choose. As the software becomes more and more sophisticated and more secure, then we can collect more personal data of the user where we can be responsible for it. For now, it is realistic to not collect a lot of personal data from the user (or to not implement those features that collects data for now) if we cannot maintain or securely keep safe the data within a good sense of faith. That is the best we can do. The main goal of the software is to make society more of a better place, not to ruin it.