Transient life: collecting and sharing personal information

Millions of people post personal information on the internet, yet the actual information varies greatly. Some pieces are extremely brief, others are highly detailed. Some focus on the moment to moment changes of one's state and thoughts, others describe stable and long-lasting traits. To handle this diversity, we created Transient Life: a system that lets a person gather personal 'transient' information tidbits on the fly and share this collected information with others. Transient Life is designed as a modular sidebar located on the display's periphery. A person uses its modules to: update momentary personal state (feelings, location, happenings, and thoughts), record activity milestones done over the day as well as a 'to do' list of things left to do, collect interesting URLs and photos seen, and compose text essays of whatever has captured their interest. A person can selectively post this information as a 'today message' to one's community, and the essay to one's personal blog. Information is kept in a History Calendar, which allows one to view the information recorded on a past date.