I do many things at Singly, but first and foremost, I am a creator. Ranging from full scale product & company creation on down to hacking on the weekends, I bring things to life for a living. This idea is a big part of how I think about personal data – it’s about more than just ownership, access, and control, it’s first and foremost a platform for creation, for Making Stuff.
A platform for creation could mean almost anything, so to get started we thought about what it would feel like to create using personal data with most (if not all) of the many pain points lifted – authentication, aggregation, collation, deduplication, storage, indexing…the list is long and often deflating. I believe incredible things will happen with those obstacles out of the way and we’ve been building like crazy to make that a reality. Our first version makes it super fast and easy to create powerful, yet lightweight HTML+CSS+JS apps that leverage an extensible set of your personal data without the need to run a server or write any backend code to solve the problems on the aforementioned Long List. We are beginning to send out invites and are so excited to see what sort of Stuff you Make. 
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With that, the only thing better than Making Stuff, is Making Stuff with Friends, so last Thursday we reached out to some friends, new and old and all gathered at our space here in the mission to experiment and Make Stuff Together (over beer and pizza, of course). In the course of only about 3 hours some really awesome things were created!
- Beau Gunderson made Excessive Mapper, an app to see your locations (checkins, geotagged tweets and photos, etc) over time on a map:
All my checkins on Excessive Mapper (can you tell my girlfriend lives in NYC???)
- Max Schultz made DragPhoto, an app to see your photos how you used to as a kid – a stack of polaroids that you can drag around:
- Drag Photo shows your photos as a stack of Polaroids
- Greg Schwartz made a Strava connector, extending Locker Project (the open source technology powering Singly accounts) to pull in biking and running data from Strava.
- Inderpreet and Arvind are working on a daily journal app, which Inderpreet wrote about on his blog.
- Kristján Pétursson made Prolific Posters, an easy way to see who the noisiest posters are across all of your streams:
I actually unfollowed two of these accounts after seeing this!
- Chris Hannam extended the Foursquare connector to pull in your badges.
Soon, we will be sending out more invites to developers to get an account and start building things. Sign up at singly.com to get on the list and be sure to put in your GitHub handle if you are a developer. If you are as excited as we are (improbable, but I’m open to the possibility!) and want to get in as soon as possible, there are a few ways to get (extra) early access:
- Come to a Singly event (details to come on Twitter, but expect another Make-a-thon in early January)
- Join us in IRC – #lockerproject on freenode
- Join the Singly developer mailing list
- Write some Locker Project code (this will get you invited right away!)
I am so excited for the community we are building around this idea and can’t wait to meet as many of you as possible in the future!
