Yawnlog: A Social Sleep Tracker
Every night we lay down in our beds, our consciousness enters a different state and then we stay that way for the next 8 hours. It's pretty amazing if you think about it! It can be no surprise then that someone has created a way to track and share details about such a big part of our lives. Some people sleep with their friends, now the rest of us can track our sleep - with our friends.
Yawnlog is a wacky new site that lets you track how much sleep you're getting, note how good the sleep was, record your dreams and compare all of that information with your friends. This is no laughing matter! Imagine cross referencing aggregate sleeping hours and moods with a timeline of historically significant events. Silly as this service might sound, we think it sounds pretty cool, too.
Some people like to track everything, and we do imagine that it could be helpful to see longer periods of poor or insufficient sleep than we realized we were experiencing.
Unfortunately the site doesn't seem particularly well constructed, but we sure love the idea. (Update: Lead developer Matt Blake emailed to let us know that the site was put together in a 24 hour hackathon and is only a few days old. Fair enough, hopefully Blake will be able to continue developing it.) We found Yawnlog over on KillerStartups, where you'll find a lot of apps that look like they were written by people who aren't getting enough sleep but some good ones too.
Imagine the possibilities! Say you're thinking of taking a job at one place that reports an aggregate of restless, stunted sleep patterns - but another potential employer's people have an unusually high rate of dreams about flying! Which job are you going to take? Say Republicans slept better after Obama's first major speech last night than Democrats did after Bush's first speech in office. Talk about tangible evidence of bi-partisan comfort with the Presidency! How much sleep, on average, does the staff of ReadWriteWeb get compared to other big tech blogs? More and better sleep, I'd bet.
Of course all of that would require far more adoption of a technology like Yawnlog than is ever going to happen, but we do like to fantasize. This kind of aggregate sleep pattern analysis will probably be a bullet point in the brochure for the forthcoming Google Brain Implant.
In the meantime, we got a kick out of Yawnlog and will see how long we can stick with using it. It's proof that you can socialize anything online. If you'd like to put our sleepy heads together, my profile is here, friend me up and let's share some dreams. I've added Yawnlog to my Morning Coffee Firefox plug-in, so I'll be reminded to make an entry first thing each morning.
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This is actually a pretty cool idea, and I *love* graphs (seriously)... I only wish it were a little easier to input data. Like, by twittering or emailing. Needs an iPhone app maybe. Alarm clock integration?
Evan, those are great ideas. Agreed that there's a whole lot more that could be done to make this easier to use - especially when users are still waking up!
re: Unfortunately the site doesn't seem particularly well constructed, but we sure love the idea.
I heard they built the site in 24 hours, 4 days ago.(Take a look at the @yawnlog twitter) Give the kids a break.
RLM - fair point, I should have figured as much. Having an email with the developer right now.
As a real product? Yawn...
It seems there are a lot of "cool" social apps out there but they seem so niche it is hard to think that you would get anywhere with them and launched to the average consumer. I think the real power that we see, specifically with Yawnlog, is the benefit that social media can have in a setting other than just gadgets and a friend circle. These apps can be useful for life sciences or other types of longitudinal studies.
Is the evolution of social really that it is beyond just being social?
Nice one, nice niche ;). Good improvement and integrational ideas could come from the Internet of Things! For an intro, check this handy screen cast: http://www.ideasproject.com/idea_person.webui?id=532
Marshall and I had a nice chat and we definitely were in agreement about some of the issues the site was having. We did put it together in a 24 hour sprint, and have been working incrementally on it since. We just did a big push today and have increased the speed and stability of the site significantly, so check it out.
People who are interested in this app would be even more interested in a device that actually records your sleep patterns throughout the night - allowing you to upload the data every morning and compare sleep over time: http://tinyurl.com/d5mlk3
It seems there are a lot of "cool" social apps out there but they seem so niche it is hard to think that you would get anywhere with them and launched to the average consumer. I think the real power that we see, specifically with Yawnlog, is the benefit that social media can have in a setting other than just gadgets and a friend circle. These apps can be useful for life sciences or other types of longitudinal studies.
It would be interesting to find out if people share dreams.
I've never dared ask.
why on earth would I need this? too much work for something that I hardly remember doing
http://tr.im/gOUl
Pretty neat idea. I'd love to be able to log dreams, though, and also see the rest of the world's dream logs - that'd make this app more interesting.
Any business model if there are any users?