TechCrunch wrote about a new online application called MyProgress in MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress online.   I signed up and started putting in information about myself when I realized this is way to much work to put in all the information, step by step, and I stopped.  I didn't want to spend 3-4 hours of collective time to put into MyProgress all the information it would need to start tracking my life and give me analytics about how I'm doing with aspects of my own life, compared with others.

But I like the idea if only what we were measuring could be individually configured.

Here's what I mean; I could see MyProgress as a module that could be configured to track anything …. not just the broad activities of income, interests, etc.  I have in mind Web Analyst training, for example, or a task setup with a large corporation, or just parts of your job, or your whole job in a corporate setting.  In theory, you could use adapt the MyProgress.com engine to make anything tractable and I find that much more interesting than predicting how my income is going - which I can, more or less, do for myself.  According to TechCrunch:

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”

A lot of Web 2.0 services are emerging which, if tweaked a little, could be much more powerful as an engine - just let me determine what I want to measure.   I suspect, that will happen in the future.

I also like the idea that your life can really be looked at via Analytics; So, I like the idea of what MyProgress does even though I don't have the patience to set up all the data needed to make the service effective.

In fact, one area I think they could improve now, even without allowing us to personalize/customize the MyProgress Engine; the creators of MyProgress could allow people to play games to creatively and with fun, update this data.  Right now, updating the modules to create a meaningful forecast of your activities take a lot of painful detailed entries into their online database - and while this is probably worth it, I simply don't want to do it.  I want it to be fun, and I want the data to sorta "magically" populate the MyProgress Database - without me having to explicitly put in every detail of my salary, job, interests so it can track it.

But that's' just me.  I read the comments on the TechCrunch post of MyProgress.com and it was mixed.  Several of the comments were based on privacy issues that could be engendered esp if the information gets hacked or even linked up with Facebook and Twitter.   Others had problems with the interface and felt, as I do, that it's too cluttered and complicated to input the data.  Still others are willing to give MyProgress.com the benefit of the doubt and say it's a great idea.

One alternative that's closer to what I might find useful now is Goalmigo which lets you define your own goal and track the progress of how your doing.  You can also share your goal with others to let them know how your doing (IE: blogging about losing weight might work well with Goalmigo as you can all share your progress with your readers).   Also, you can join groups that have similar goals and get tips from others in that group.  However, Gomingo does not have the analytics part that compares your progress to others in a related group (but I'm not sure anyone really needs that…. or do they)?