Jennicam and the Birth of 'Lifecasting' | Hacker News Reader

Jennicam and the Birth of 'Lifecasting'

digg.com

66 pointsdanso47 comments

I'm not directly exposing my life, but I have been running a site that streams photos taken within 250 meters of my cell phone's current location every three minutes. Check it out: www.instagrampostsnear.me

Side note: If anyone that has art world connections could hook me with the possibility of exhibiting some of the best photos, it would be very much appreciated.

That's an interesting angle. Nice work.

Thanks :)

hey that's cool. how did you get the gps location of your phone programmatically? is this a commercial project or are you going to open source it?

I am using a custom built iOS app to regularly send my gps coords via an HTTP request to a Flask app. The majority of the code is already open source, but I certainly think it has the potential to be a commercial project. If anyone wants to fund it, send me an email, haha.

Not OP nor do I know how they're doing it but you could do this sort of thing with one of the many location tracking apps that have an API access to the data it collects. For example there's the Moves app you could use which provides one

https://dev.moves-app.com/docs/api

There's work at Indiana University that is about machine learning and lifecams. The question is thus: is there an algorithm that can determine private moments (bathroom, sex, ...) and remove them from the video/picture stream?

One of the research faculty obtained $1.5 million from the NIH for this research.

Source: http://itnews.iu.edu/articles/2014/iu-study-explores-privacy...

>One of the research faculty obtained $1.5 million from the NIH for this research.

There are presumably other uses for this technology....

Does anyone remember DotComGuy? (not to be confused by the similarly named Kim of recent fame) A man with the audacious goal of staying inside for a whole year and just ordering whatever he wanted off the internet.

Perhaps not so impressive now, but in 2000 it seemed pretty futuristic. I wonder what crazy social experiments are happening today that will seem normal in 15 years.

> Perhaps not so impressive now

These days you could do one with the rule that you're not allowed to use the internet for your day to day life (e.g. Still use it for work, still use it to update your online diary for the challenge)

halfhonk, gyrate.org, mija.nu (nay), etc. I remember all of them.

Whoa. The real story here is that Digg is still around.

Since its demise and revival by Betaworks, Digg has actually been one of my favorite front pages...somewhere between HN/NYT, and Reddit. They have a few clickbait things but mostly a pretty interesting variety of aggregated stories. This was the first time I've seen them publish their own articles (though I think they've been doing videos for some time)

Also, to give credit where it's due: Digg was one of the few places to follow through on the "let's make something better" after Google Reader closed shop...I hadn't used Google Reader in awhile so I've forgotten what features it excelled on, but Digg's reader is the only feed reader I use currently: http://digg.com/reader

I was not aware of either of these things, having written off digg a long time ago. I'm going to definitely check both out.

You should give Snapzu (http://snapzu.com) a try. We're trying to keep improving on it, so any feedback is welcome!

I used to use Snapzu but forcing users to click a link twice (once to take you to the Snapzu comment page and then again to "Continue Reading") to navigate to the article is awful and probably a large reason people give up on it.

Digg does the same with videos. Very frustrating.

also one of my frontpages. digg reader replaced google reader for me and now I end up checking their top stories once a while

I've been doing something similar for the past few months[0], but via an app I made specifically for this kind of thing[1]. It's really cool to be able to play back my montage, and there really is a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from watching other people's "lifecasts."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izZkCTBI3Bo [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/beet-for-moments/id960913398...

wanted this for a while, will have to check this out. do you have servers mashing the video clips and keeping a video link on youtube or just keep appending?

The clips are stored individually on our end and played in sequence in the app (this allows for easy scrubbing/segmenting of series of clips, as well as things like watching friends' updates as they post videos). The YouTube compilation is all the clips exported from the app and then I put some music in the background.

This is a weird memory trip. I went to Dickinson College as well, though a decade later. I always forget how awful and prison like those rooms in her dorm were. The cam doesn't give you the sense of how small they were. I believe that room is about 10x6, basically the whole thing except the door and desk are in frame. A friend actually lived in that room, in maybe 2007 and it was surreal to stand in there know it had been the birthplace of the internet overshare.

I wonder if it's legal and interesting to have a drone that follows me and records my life but from afar, while avoiding obstacles.

10-20 minute battery life is normal for quadrotor drones right now.

Anyone read The Circle? - http://www.amazon.com/The-Circle-Dave-Eggers/dp/0345807294

Pretty soon everyone will be "going transparent" whether or not they'd like to.

Yes! Lots of interesting ideas - and some thinly veiled and extremely acerbic criticism of Google et al. - in that book. It's a quick read, and certainly not Eggers' best or most important work, but I think it'd definitely be of interest to many here.

Have loved the idea of 'lifecasting' since the very begining. From Jennicam to Justin Kan's original JTV (and iJustine rocking on the same platform.) to Frank Taylor who is still broadcasting for many years over at: http://franktaylorslifecast.com/

There was also the oft forgotten Control.TV which Seth Green was a part of. The show focused on one guy living in a house completely rigged with cameras who's day to day activities were decided by the viewers. Almost everything was sponsored, so he would eat Snickers bars all the time, drive a Ford, etc. Of everything, control.tv was my favorite and I'm still looking for something to replace it.

Alas, I dont think Periscope OR meerkat will be that thing.

It's scary to think about, but one of my college roommates had a similar setup for years. This story was a big walk down memory lane for me. His bedroom (and I think the common living room in our suite) was on a webcam 24/7 for my last two years in college (1999-2000). I think it was influenced by Jennicam, but there were a number of people that had similar sites (I remember a Lauracam...).

I had my own webcam, but wasn't very keen on being as transparent. I was happy to live as a role player (Roommate #3) on his site.

The site was "bixworld.com" if anyone ever visited it.

I had a college friend stream live video using his webcam in his dorm room in 1997 or so. Apparently he didn't warn his roommate about it so every once in a while you'd catch his roommate walking around without a shirt on.

Gimlet Media's Reply All podcast had an episode about Jennicam:

http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-the-jennicam/

They also had a blog post with additional facts like it got her a walk on role on Diagnosis Murder:

http://gimletmedia.com/2014/12/6-things-i-couldnt-include-in...

This article is by the Reply All team.

I webcasted my wedding in Vegas ($100 add on). It was a great hit. With more millennials jumping into the marriage pool, this is a great startup vertical (horizontal?). Just make a pi, put a sim card on it / satellite link/ connect to wifi, and you can invite everyone to your special life event.

The real problem is spotty internet connections causing the filming of the "big event" to fail. Just has to happen a couple of times before people will be leery of your product (because when it comes to weddings everything has to be "perfect").

Such a livestreamer would have to use data connections with fallbacks from multiple mobile data providers and possible a satellite fallback, and a mobile signal booster to bring inside venues.

Last I checked that was stupid expensive. Here in the Bay Area Caltrain doesn't have wifi (lol?) so I went on a kick of "I'm gonna get THE BEST MOBILE INTERNET AVAILABLE ANYWHERE" to use on the train. I ended up with a simple Verizon jetpack because the satellite internet stuff comes in briefcases, is CRAZY expensive (like thousands of dollars for the equipment and hundreds for the service) and on top of all that it's stupid slow.

$2,239, up to 492Kbps: http://www.groundcontrol.com/BGAN.htm

I just read a digg story about Jennicam. Next I am going to surf over to Kozmo and have some snacks sent over.

You'd better check if you have enough flooz, though.

Ah yes, who could forget Flooz. The original Bitcoin.

You didn't get your Webvan delivery this week?

No way, dude. Use urbanfetch.

Holy crap digg.com still exists!?

Hmm, it does seem to predate Justin.tv, although it was just regular image updates, not video. Basically a traffic cam for a college woman.

Yes, it "seems" to predate Justin.tv by eleven years actually.

It also predates Google, Facebook, and web based email.

That really put this in perspective. The site started 2 years before google.

Just to keep the timeline clear, it only predates web-based email by a couple of months. Jennicam started in April 1996 and HoTMaiL came out two and a half months later. It predates those other things by years.

Web-based email was launched in Q1 1995 actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmail

So it doesn't predate webmail at all.

Just goes to show you, context is everything.

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