Today at the “InfoVis for the Masses” paper session here at IEEE InfoVis 2007, a particularly interesting application was mentioned that provides meta data about your computer usage. Here’s their plug:

“Truth is, digital life is redefining the landscape of our social interactions, our activities, the meaning of community and even who we are. We build software products that explore new ways to help you understand, visualize, express and share your digital life. Some people like to describe what we do as ‘personal analytics’. That’s pretty good actually.”

The application is called Slife. Cool. A visualization of computer usage; in particular my usage. Over the course of the year/month/week/day, when was I spending the most time on my machine? How much time am I spending on what applications? and what I’m doing within those applications? What sort of insight can I discover into the computing activities that occupy so much of my time? Slife provides this kinds of “personal analytics” and visualizes this data. See, cool.

The crew at Slife Labs didn’t spot there. Enter Slifeshared, integrated with Slife:

“…[it] is an activity network for you and your friends where you share your live computer activities, such as videos you watch, music you listen to, web pages you find interesting and much more as a way to stay in touch.”

Slifeshare puts an Facebook-esque spin on an already exciting application. Again, cool.

Currently Slife is only available for OS X, but looks like a Windows beta version is available.