Friday
by Paul Wilks
Apr 21, 2011 5:32 PM –
Install
Friday, turn your phone into a friend who can answer questions about your life! Note: Friday is in Private alpha. First register at the Friday App’s website and once you receive an invite, you can download the app from Android market. ***Unless you are invited, Friday won’t work, even if you download it***
Do you realize how powerful your smartphone is? If not, Friday will make you realize. Just install Friday and it will track every activity of yours. The places you go, the calls you make, your texts, your language everything. You can just ask Friday questions about your life and Friday will give you answers. Friday can understand English and answer pretty much anything about your life, that the phone can track.
Price: Free
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Analyses your digital life to gain artificial intelligence profile about you.
- Allows you to then search these activities and combine the factors.
- Lets you to create voice notes and typed notes.
- Simple yet useful user interface.
- Very detailed analytics.
- Helps you keep track of your life.
Cons
- Only available on Private alpha. You need to apply for an invite
- No web interface.
- Controls sometimes lag slightly.
- Sometimes fails to update.
- You might find it a bit intrusive, privacy assurances could be clearer.
- No Exchange support yet.
Friday wants you to be friends with your phone. And not just friends, it wants you to be quite intimate. Ultimately it wants you to ask your phone questions. Questions like; When did I last call Mom? What calls did I make when I was at my buddies house? How many times did I call my girlfriend last month? Friday tracks everything your phone is capable of tracking, and subsequently keeps track of you. It is a clever and powerful tool that can build detailed analytics of your individual patterns. As the blurb says “With Friday, you never forget any moment in your life. Your life is always a question away!” Friday is currently in private alpha stage of development and you need to apply for an invite, details below.
Features:
Friday collects and collates all kinds of information about what you do on your phone. It tracks your calls, texts, emails, music, photos and locations. It lets you make notes and gives you reminders for important events. It then lets you cross-reference these things and ask it questions like: Where was I when I sent a text message to my sister last week? What music was I listening to on the bus 3 weeks ago? Where did I take that photo? How many places did I visit last week? You can perform wider searches like how many calls did I make last week? How many text messages did I send to Kevin last month?
Additionally the note taking functionality is helpful. You can make voice notes or typed ones, and it will note when and where you made them for future reference. While this function isn’t revolutionary, the everything-under-one-roof aspect of Friday is good if you need to keep track of such things.
For an alpha release, Friday is very advanced. I have had no force-closures and, while the screen occasionally sees fit to lapse into moments of unresponsiveness, there is very few problems with the user interface. Considering it is crunching all kinds of statistics and numbers, it suffers little speed-issues.
This entire concept goes toward ideals we’ve seen in Sci-Fi movies when algorithms can artificially learn enough about you to answer questions about you, make patterns and discover behaviors (kinda creepy I suppose). This even supports an initiative Google is leading towards with personalized search, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, spoke on this at TechCrunch Disrupt (2010). Can we say Google acquisition?
Watch on Mobile
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Friday – Dashboard All
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Friday – Dashboard Individual Search
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Friday – Question Screen
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Friday – Search by Date
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Friday – Results Screen Unique Day
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Friday – Password Screen
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Friday – Options
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Friday – Notification
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Friday – Voicenote Saving
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Friday – Settings
Usefulness:
Your boss thinks you just hung up on him last week. You can prove your battery was dead. Sometimes that’s useful.
Ease of Use:
Friday is simple to use and for the most part very intuitive.
Frequently Used:
The app there, available for your information parsing… to hopefully help you answer your live’s questions when you need them.
Interface:
The interface is fresh, contemporary and well thought out. In some places the navigation could be made clearer. There are statistics and graphs aplenty and it left me thinking whether a web-interface might be additionally useful.
AndroidTapp.com Rating
(4.3 out of 5)
Should you Download Friday? Friday wants your phone to know everything about you; the calls you make and to who, the texts you sent, the pictures you took at that party last month, the music track you listened to last week on the bus when your battery was running low. For many people Friday will be a clever, helpful and intuitive tool that keeps track of the things you do, always happy to remind you of something you may have forgotten. For some it will be a little intrusive, it really does collect a lot of information. While this didn’t put me off, it might be a bit weird for some people. I find Friday useful, interesting and fun to use, so I’d recommend it to anyone willing to give it a go. You do need to apply via www.friday-app.com to receive an invite and I waited around four weeks for mine to come through.
It must be remembered that Friday is only in alpha stage of development, only the developers themselves will know how much of this review is still relevant when it comes to general release. Yet, even in it’s current state it has huge amounts of potential, and could become one of the essential Android apps.