So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about our first homework assignment for this course. As it turns out, I have been tracking and also sharing parts of my browsing activity for some time now. To accomplish this, I use an application called Eyebrowse, which was developed at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and which I took over the development of when I came to MIT. It is an application that is somewhat similar to RescueTime but instead allows users to be selective about what they track, and then shares that information publicly as a way for people to find interesting content from each other and converse with other people while browsing.

Users create an account on the website and install a Chrome extension. They can then choose to whitelist certain domains or selectively publish their visits to certain pages, which the extension tracks and pushes to their feed. You can also do other things like see who else has been on the page you are on, post comments or chat on any page on the web, or follow other people to see visits from their feed.

Here is a link to my feed: http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/users/amyxzhang

And here is a screenshot:

My eyebrowse profile, showing my most recent shared browsing activity.

As you can see, my profile contains the webpages I’ve chosen to share in reverse chronological order, links to visit them, ability to filter by keywords and time, and tags added by myself. There’s a public API for anyone to play with the data themselves (http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/api/v1/history-data?format=json&user__username=amyxzhang&offset=0&limit=10). There’s also a visualization page containing some dynamic visualizations with the ability to filter, save as static image, and embed as a widget on a webpage (http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/users/amyxzhang/visualizations?query=&date=last%202%20weeks)

Unfortunately, wordpress.org does not allow code snippets so I can’t embed the dynamic widgets. You’ll have to visit the webpage above for those. However, here are some static images of my activity over the last two weeks:

A word cloud of page titles from webpages I visited in the last two weeks.

My browser visits broken down hour and by my top domains over the last two weeks.

My browser visits broken down by day of the week and by my top domains over the last two weeks.

One can clearly see that I spend quite a lot of time on coding websites, especially this last Monday, when I decided to spend the holiday upgrading this very application from Bootstrap 2 to 3.

Since I’ve been collecting my browsing data for a long time now (almost a whole year I believe), I can also go much further back to notice larger trends. Here are those last two graphs again except over the last year:

My browser visits over the last year broken down by time of day.

It seems that I’ve been getting better about stepping away from the computer before 2AM, at least in the past two weeks compared to the last year. And since activity on StackOverflow is a good indication that I am coding, it seems that I’ve conducted a lot of this very late at night. This graph also makes painfully clear how late I start the day on average. I’m also surprised by the presence of Mashable in the top 10, as it’s a media site I never really thought I visited often.

My browser visits over the last year broken down by day of week.

Looking at days in the week, it’s interesting to see that my coding work (or visits to StackOverflow) increases from its lowest point on Monday, reaches a peak on Thursday, and quickly tapers off once I hit Friday. My media consumption however remains fairly steady.

Now for some more high-level reflections of this whole experience. Before two weeks ago when I got this assignment, I had only whitelisted certain web domains that I was reasonably comfortable sharing with the world – things like Wikipedia, the New York Times, and various coding and research related websites. Beginning two weeks ago, in an effort to capture more of my media diet, I started whitelisting everything that remotely resembled news or media (excluding social media – I still wasn’t comfortable sharing that), so all my embarrassing visits to BuzzFeed and random gossip sites were also tracked and shared. The experience was really interesting to me not just to see what I had visited and notice trends, but also in a meta way to see how my tracking and sharing of my browsing history caused me to browse differently. Particularly this experience made me much more mindful of my media consumption and careful and picky about how I chose to spend my time online. For instance, in Eyebrowse, there’s a feature that makes it possible to at any moment turn off all tracking on even whitelisted domains, effectively turning off Eyebrowse as if it were in incognito mode. By having that option available, I became more thoughtful and aware of what I was doing when I had the option to choose to be privately or publicly browsing. And while tracking and visualizing the data played a role in that, it was the added step of then having that data be shared and choosing when and what data to share that made me very conscious of my bad (and good) habits.

While I hadn’t explicitly developed Eyebrowse for this purpose before, this experience has made me think of the potential benefits of a social app like Eyebrowse towards not just monitoring but keeping accountable one’s goals for their information diet. Indeed many current applications related to maintaining exercise habits and food diets incorporate social sharing to provide a measure of accountability and support. And after all, why shouldn’t we be as mindful of what we feed our minds as we do our bodies? If you have any thoughts around this, I’d love to hear it! As I continue to develop Eyebrowse, I will work on adding features to make this process easier, included better aggregate statistics and visualizations and easier ability to share these reports (like little media diaries!) on social media and personal websites. I’ll also build in more levels of obfuscated sharing, for instance the ability to share that I’m on Facebook but not specific pages.

If you’re interested in seeing where this goes, I encourage you to try out Eyebrowse! I’m still actively developing it and would love to get some more users as well as any feedback and bug reports. I haven’t released it to the public or anything yet – just publicized it around MIT CSAIL and my research group – so the only people using it right now consistently are me and my advisor, David Karger. By default, nothing is tracked when you install the extension. If you have more questions, feel free to contact me (axz@mit.edu) or read our FAQ: http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/faq.