Innovation in Software

Michael Arrington appears to be drunk. Or at least, he’s suggesting he is the kind of person who would wear a Life Recorder, which my casual talking-to-people-down-the-pub research about a year ago shows only drunk people seem to think is a good idea. Arrington though thinks they’re the wristwatch of the 21st century:

Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.

Would you wear that device? I think I would. [...]

Lost. The. Plot.

In his poll, just under a thousand people agree, but they haven’t thought this through. The people you meet may not wish your conversations to be recorded and many may not want to be photographed. You will not have the time to spend browsing through what happened last week because you have this week to live. They will be an extra device to manage, charge, and maintain. They will record things you will want to forget. They will mess up your social life as people actively reject and or object to your presence. They will mark you out as a self-absorbed prick.

Yes, there will be startups touting them and selling quite a few. I’m sure some people will buy them and annoy their friends with them. The narcissistic types in society will love them. A few celebrities might even buy them and have them regularly throw snippets to twitter. But they will be ultimately be considered a fad as people realise that they are more of an intrusion into their lives than an assistant.

Within military circles they might prove popular, and the police have been trialling “helmet cams” for years. Beyond those niches though, these things are an absolute waste of time and money.

Who on earth else is going to want these things beyond the self-obsessed?