Attention Mac RescueTime/Firefox users!

At RescueTime, we’re Mac folk too (well, most of us are). That’s why it was a huge disappointment to us that Mozilla decided to be the only browser in the OSX market to ship without the ability to pull the URL from the current tab (a feature that RescueTime relies on to break your time down by individual site). A lot of applications depend on this functionality– it’s no surprise that this bug is getting plenty of attention in Firefox’s public bug tracker. Want to help? Vote up the issue and help spread the word.

What this means in the short term

If you upgrade (or have upgraded) to Firefox 3.6 (on the Mac only), your browser time will be reported as “Firefox” time rather than broken down by site.

Short term (or long term) alternatives

To not lose this feature you can stick with FF 3.5 or you can change browsers to Chrome or Safari. The RescueTeam has all shifted to Chrome by necessity and we’re really loving it– it’s fast and reliable. Note: if you do switch to Chrome, use the release version and not the dev version.

What we’re doing moving forward

We have a (sub-optimal) workaround that we’re testing— we may release that if testing goes well. We’re investigating other options and are hopeful that Mozilla steps up here.

[This Guest post was written by Scott Scheper, an entrepreneur, writer and investor based out of Southern California. Scott writes about truths and lessons that show how to get focused in our age of distraction. Through his online book, http://howtogetfocused.com, Scott releases chapters individually and leverages the comments from his readers in order to edit and enhance his book.]

Ever wondered why Facebook keeps releasing redesigns? I mean, the old design was fine, right?

Facebook provides an atmosphere to keep up with your friends in a neat, simple environment. This was Facebook’s edge. It was Facebook’s value proposition. In part, this is why Facebook surpassed its over-crowded competitor, Myspace.

Yet one thing remains certain: Facebook is a business. And in order for their business to thrive, they must make money.

In this piece, we’ll explore the “why” behind Facebook’s redesign. The goal is not to call out Facebook for being a distraction. After all, it’s probably the most useful online utilities, as it centers on cultivating relationships with friends. The goal is to promote awareness. It’s to make users more aware of Facebook’s goals. It’s to outline how Facebook makes money. And through this, you’ll see how Facebook’s monetization strategy sits is in direct conflict in making you a more productive person.

Facebook’s latest re-design centers on improving two things: (i) Increasing search-based ad impressions, and (ii) increasing overall ad impressions. We’ll explore why below.

I. Why is Facebook focusing on driving up search?

Facebook is driving up its search efforts for three reasons, (i) to combat Twitter, and (ii) to gain more insight into their users in order to advertise them (they’ll log which search terms you look for), (iii) display text ads on the results page.

Think about the people behind Facebook right now. They’re young, they’re smart and they’ve got confidence. Many employees within Facebook think they’re the biggest thing since sliced bread.

Search is a massive business model within the internet. Google is down the street raking in ~$20 billion every year through search. You probably recognize the thought process of Facebook. It likens itself to a caveman’s thought process.

Facebook’s caveman discovery process:

• Google good.
• Facebook good.
• Google a search company.
• Google like information.
• Facebook have information Google can’t have.
• Google make lot of money through search ads.
• Facebook try to be like Google to make big-money-pow.
• Facebook make search more important in redesign.
• Facebook make more money from search.
• Facebook happier

Facebook’s shift towards search prominence doesn’t add more distraction to its environment. I actually support Facebook’s decision to make search a more prominent part of their strategy and revenue model. Yet the fact remains that Facebook’s core revenue model sits on advertising, and advertising’s goals are directly aligned with promoting distraction.

II. Facebook’s Core Business Model: Distraction

Using RescueTime, I observed my time spent on Facebook. By no means am I a Facebook addict. In fact, I rarely ever use it.

“I use Facebook for development and work purposes. I maybe use it 5-10 minutes/day.”

That’s what I told myself. But apparently, I lied. RescueTime found that I use Facebook an average of 35 minutes/day.

How much would you guess the average user spends on Facebook? I mean people are seriously addicted, right? Maybe two hours, maybe three hours?

Nope, the average user spends only 45 minutes per day surfing Facebook; however, crunched into this 45 minute window is an average of ~70 pageviews.

More pageviews equals more exposure to ads (impressions).

Think about that for a second. That’s an average of almost two clicks per minute. There’s likely a wealth of people that drastically exceed that figure. Facebook is crunching out a massive amount of ad impressions in a very short amount of time.

This may prove why Facebook is so addicting. You’re actively engaged immediately after logging in. Before you know it, you’ve just wizzed on 45 minutes, which seemed like 5 minutes. Time flies when you’re actively engaged. And Facebook has done this better than anyone out there.

Facebook’s core U.S. business model centers on advertising. Yes, they have virtual goods in place (in order to monetize the areas where there are practically zero advertisers–like Indonesia, the Philipines, Japan, etc.) Being that their business model is contingent upon advertising, their goal is to drive up impressions, which in turn will drive up clicks (money).

Facebook also has more pageviews than Yahoo’s network of sites, and they’re fast-approaching Google. This means that Facebook has the potential to show more ads than Yahoo’s content network. Yet, Facebook’s ads, unlike Yahoo’s, are significantly more relevant (and also more pricey).

Here’s an example of a Facebook ad:

Yahoo ads are your typical display ads (banners with pictures–Gif or Swf file). See below:

But the images above only show the look and feel of the ads. The key parts sit within the system and algorithms powering the ads. This is where Facebook shines. Facebook has the data advertisers have dreamed of since the dawn of time: knowing people’s true desires.

Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself

Sure, Facebook knows your personal information. They know where you live. They know where your friends live. They know where your family lives. They know your interests, your goals, your passions, your role-models. However, the true gems sit in the data. It’s more than likely that Facebook logs additional data about you. Facebook knows how much time you spend on Facebook per day. They know what time of day you log in.

Facebook also knows which profiles you click on most. Through this data, they can capture your hidden desires.

Let’s take a use-case example:

Ashley is an average looking 16 year-old high school girl. She hangs out with the nerdy crowd. Her interests include reading. Her favorite music is the Jonas Brothers. She’s having trouble getting over that nerd hump–and the fact that she still likes the Jonas Brothers.

Ashley has 246 friends. Not much for a teen her age. Her average time spent on Facebook outweighs others’ at 2 hours/day.

Ashley clicks on Stacy’s profile an average of ten times a day. Ashley knows Stacy through friends.

Stacy is a popular girl and hangs with the popular crowd. Stacy has 1,200 friends and her wall is always flooded with funny recollections of the previous day and photos–photo’s in which Ashley constantly browses. In Stacy’s profile, it shows that Stacy loves the band Greenday, and Stacy likes “rocking out.”

Guess what types of ads Ashley (the geeky girl that loves Jonas Brothers) will see?

Greenday ads (the band that Stacy, the popular girl, absolutely loves)

Facebook has the potential to carry this out. This is the truest form of relevant advertising. Facebook essentially knows what Ashley wants to be through the data Ashley logs in clicking and browsing Stacy’s photos.

Thus, the more you do on Facebook, and the more distracted you are, gives Facebook more data on what type of person you are; thus, allowing them to deliver more relevant ads.

So the question social networks, like Facebook, ask themselves everyday is, “How can we get, (i) more people using Facebook, (ii) more often, and (iii) get them to see our ads more frequently?”

There are hundreds of ways they attempt to do this (adding features like video, games, fan pages, etc.). However, the main way is through four core distractions:

The Four Innate Distractions From Facebook:

People know me. I'm a pretty big deal.

1. Notifications: Those little red bubbles that display a certain number of messages drive clicks. People love clicking those little red notification icons. This is, in part, driven by the fact that your Facebook inbox displays the same style. And people love feeling important. “Ohhh ahh, someone took time out of their day to message me directly through Facebook? I must be important.” Getting a direct message is more intimate than a wall post. There’s a reason why the Facebook Inbox notification has the same look and feel as other notifications. Facebook wants you to click on anything with a red notification box. And looking at the new Facebook design, you’ll see much more of this.
2. Email alerts: This is Facebook’s way of saying, “Get the hell back over here.”
3. Chat: This is Facebook’s way of saying, “You’re not leaving.” When a friend ping’s you, “Hey! How’s it going? Been a long time. How’s the family?” You can’t just ditch them and leave Facebook. At this point, Facebook’s got you by the balls.
4. Pictures: This may possibly be the biggest source of distraction for Facebook users. As soon as pictures pop-up in the Facebook news feed, say goodbye to 10 minutes of your life. People love pictures. It’s easy, pictures speak a thousand words, and conveniently for Facebook, there’s ads snugged next to pictures.

In order to negate these distractions in the face of Facebook’s re-design, I recommend the following steps:

1. Use RescueTime to set up alerts. These alerts will help you identify and keep track of the time spent of Facebook.
2. Get used to the red notification buttons, and feel comfortable in keeping them unread.
3. Before you login to Facebook I highly recommend writing down your objective in logging in; if you try making a mental note of your objective when logging in, you’ll forget when you’re hit with thousands of social stimuli (friend requests, pokes, wall posts, etc.) For example, write down on a sticky note, “Logging in to wish my cousin a happy birthday.”
4. Turn off all email alerts–anything “Facebook” should not appear in your email inbox
5. Go into invisible mode on Facebook Chat
6. Categorize your news feeds into groups–those that are your close friends, work friends, family, and “rando’s” (by Rando’s, I mean random people that you felt awkward in declining their friend request). This will help you not get distracted with photos posted by randos, as they won’t appear in your family group.
7. Last, LifeHacker put together a great resource of Facebook Apps that help you get more productive
8. Also, don’t forget about Facebook lite: http://lite.facebook.com

In the end, Facebook’s latest re-design centers on increasing notifications and boosting their search usage. Facebook is definitely moving in the right direction in terms of captivating users; however, it’s critical to understand how and why time flies when surfing Facebook. Hopefully the overview and tips above help you focus and become more productive online. Until, the next re-design, good luck.

Copyright 2010 creative commons How to Get Focused

Quite a while ago, RescueTime started allowing premium users to track detailed activity inside their applications, and, later on, websites as well. Here, I’m going to discuss how we are going about providing this feature, and then what complexities remain for some currently untracked (and some tracked) applications. Premium users are then invited, from inside RescueTime, to request details for their favorite applications and websites that do not already have it.

You might wonder what mechanism allows us to track this information: we strive to maintain a secure and lightweight, minimally intrusive application, and didn’t want to go spelunking around in your system to uncover this. The answer is surprisingly simple and actually very powerful: in most cases, the window title of your current application lets us know, and often it may provide even more valuable details for those who wish to mine their own data.

Let’s look at a few examples for the application TextMate:

alert.rb — RescueTime
plan.rb — RescueTime


You can see here that TextMate puts the file name AND the project name in the title. In fact, this is even more valuable than what we were originally looking for (the document name). With this result you can search for results by document OR project name, and you can even use the TextMate project name as a keyword for our Pace projects keyword suggestion feature.

Here’s an example from a website, Google Docs:

User Flow - Google Docs
Google Docs - Folder - RescueTime


As you can see here, Google Docs also provides interesting information. However in this case there is some redundancy– in general we’d rather have too much information that we can clean up for you than too little, with poor resolution.

This brings to fore the crucial technique behind activity details: we can apply fixed rules to modify these window title details on a per application basis. For example, Apple’s iChat app, when you have multiple chats open but are using the tabbed mode, sets the title as “3 Chats” or “4 Chats”. While this number might be a wee bit interesting, mostly it just makes for noisy results: we’d as “separate” activities every time you added or closed a tab. So we apply a rule on all iChat details: if it looks like “X Chats” we just alter it to be “Multiple Chats”.

Clearly, for sanity’s sake, we try to keep these rules strict, sensible, and simple. In most cases we don’t need any special rule. Any time a new application is enabled for details, if we get customer requests for details adjustments, we make our best attempt to accommodate them, if possible. This is especially applicable for those of you with complex internal web applications.

Certain applications that make extensive use of modal windows pose challenges to us. The chief example here is Adobe’s creative products. Currently, if you move to a modal window to adjust something on your image, we would get the name of the modal window, but not the current image being edited. This proves less than ideal for designers who have a strong interest in tracking time by particular images for clients. For this reason, we do not have details enabled on these kinds of applications. We are working hard on a solution that meets customer needs here. In the meantime, our Pace product offers designers another way to tie time spent and tracked by RescueTime back to clients and projects.

Finally, a few notes on privacy. Users will quickly notice that Mail is the other top-used application for which there is no or limited detail provided. During internal testing, we found that window titles for almost all mail applications include the current message subject in the title. We quickly determined that there was no good predictable way to remove it by rule, and that it posed a pretty significant “oops” moment of privacy risk. Some other apps the put conversation level detail into titling are Skype and Twitter. We have a work around for Skype, but continue to consider and monitor others.

Which brings up a feature under consideration for which we welcome your input: would it be valuable for you to control which applications get details tracked yourself, on your account only? Feel free to comment with your opinion, or to submit feedback through the website.

Now, for you premium users, here’s the candy at the end of this long post: you can now request details for any application that doesn’t currently have them by using the Time Reports / Activities view and clicking on an app or website that doesn’t have a (# documents) addend. You’ll be on time detail page for that activity, which offers a link for making the request. This puts it into a queue we check (usually quickly) and update your favorite app. Keep in mind the limitations just discussed above.

(These are full size screenshots, so widen your screen to full width.)
Look for “api.rubyonrails.org” in the Activities list:

Now, we clicked on it, and are on its detail page:

We can click the green text to indicate our interest.

We love the fact that our users are vocal.  We get dozens of opinionated emails every day requesting features.  In the past, we’ve distributed a mess of surveys to get a understanding of which features were important to you.  But this survey is different…  It’s a more general “State of the RescueTime” sort of survey to try to help us understand more about you and your relationship with our product, how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.

So whether you are a current RescueTime user or not, we’d love to have you fill out this survey.  It’s 8 questions and should be super quick.  We’ll select 5 random participants to receive a free month of RescueTime (so be sure to include your email if you’re interested).

Thanks much to all– here’s the link: http://survey.io/survey/8b287

[note: some data in this post is missing-- given that we work on and troubleshoot our own software, sometimes we don't get to log ALL of our time in a week, but it's consistent enough that I don't think it skews these results in a big way.  We also had a vacation in each of the months in question for 1 team member]

So about a month ago, the RescueTime product team decided to experiment with working from home to see how it would effect how we spend our time.  The initial plan was to run the experiment for a week, but we realized that we were paying too close attention to the affects of the experiment and would let it “bake” for a few more weeks to get some better data.  The data (4 weeks of it) is in, and there are a few surprises.

The control – Team of 5 Working from Work (in the office!)

Total computer time logged: 582h 20m
Dev, Design, or writing time: 224h 20m
Communication/meetings: 225h 10m

Efficiency Score: 1.33 (RescueTime calculates this score based on the ratio of self-identified productive activities versus distracting ones)
Productive apps/sites: 504h 50m
Distracting apps/sites: 61h 15m
Neutral apps/sites: 16h 15m

The experiment – Team of 5 Working from Home

Total computer time logged: 657h 50m
Dev, Design, or writing time: 287h 20m
Communication/meetings: 223h 20m

Efficiency Score: 1.30 (RescueTime calculates this score based on the ratio of self-identified productive activities versus distracting ones)
Productive apps/sites: 543h 20m
Distracting apps/sites: 72h 28m
Neutral apps/sites: 42h 02m (much of this is Google Chrome for the Mac, which RescueTime currently doesn’t track sites for– likely split between productive and distracting)

So the ratio of activities doesn’t seem to be meaningfully different.  There are less meetings (“drive by” meetings and formal ones are both tracked) but there’s a lot more IM and email.  That’s not what we could’ve expected.

But what seems to be hugely different are the totals.  Take out the commutes and the longer lunches, and the totals are quit different.

Here’s a chart:

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

How we FELT

Obviously, working from home isn’t just about the hours logged.  When talking to the team, feelings on the experiment were pretty mixed:

• Most people felt like we weren’t working as hard from home and it felt like a better work/life balance.  Turns out we were working a fair bit harder, but the time reclaimed made it feel more relaxing.
• The team felt a bit less energized…  The synergy that you get when people are bouncing around ideas is pretty cool– we had a bit less of that (though we had wednesday lunches that helped a bit here).
• People worked odd hours.  Working from the office forces you into the 8-6 mode and makes it awkward to tune out in the afternoon if your heart just isn’t in it.  Conversely, when you put in your 9+ hours at work, you’re a lot less inclined to work in the evening (even if you were spinning your wheels all day).  I think it’s better to work when you feel like it than to force an artificial schedule.
• People were lonely, but dealt with it.  We all joked how excited we were to see our wives when they got home.  I personally made a much greater effort to be social with friends.  This was a lot better than the “I just want to get home and veg out” instinct that I tend to have after a long day at work.

Conclusions

Working from home gives folks a lot more time in front of a computer, if that’s what they are after.  With commutes, associated setup/teardown time, getting coffee from starbucks, lunches, and people dropping into the office, we’re all losing hours.  To be clear, all work and no play is a bad idea…  The really interesting thing about working from home is that we felt like we weren’t working as hard, but were actually logging about 22% more development and design hours.

What we’re going to do Next

A lot of us have expressed that, despite all of this, we kinda miss the office.  We’re talking about next steps.  I’m personally interested to try a hybrid approach.

[edit: Important note!  This is a new feature and (like most brand new features we release) might have a bug or two that we'll be ironing out over the coming day or two. ]

Recent Updates

[edit] On Nov. 16 we improved the offline time entry in the project editor.
[edit] On Nov. 17 we added support for query by project name to the data API.
[edit] On Nov. 18 we changed the project time editor to offer 24 hour schedule.

It’s Friday the 13th- a pretty auspicious time to do a major software release, eh?

For a few months now, we’ve been pretty focused on our users who are trying to regain focus and enhance their own productivity.  We’ve tuned up goals and alerts, added the ability to block distracting sites for brief periods of focus, and in general have tried to be the “nagging angel on your shoulder” when it comes to your productivity.

But we haven’t forgotten that lots of RescueTime users track time to help have an understanding of how they are juggling the projects in their lives.  RescueTime heretofore hasn’t been great for tracking projects…  But that’s about to change!

Introducting RescueTime Pace

RescueTime Pace attacks a very different (but complementary) business need than we’ve been attacking.  Every day people painstakingly (and inaccurately) fill out project timesheets so that they, their clients, and bosses can understand:

• how much time projects are consuming
• which clients need to be billed and how much
• how each project is broken down.  Are projects humming along?  Are they bogged down with excess communication?
• Are projects on track to finish on time?  On budget?

It’s occurred to us (and quite a few of our users– thanks to all for prodding us on this!) that RescueTime is already tracking individual tasks.  All we really needed to do to allow project tracking is give people the ability to assign blocks of time to a project in a given day.  With a few cues that RescueTime can offer, entering your time no longer has to be a painful memory exercise.  Not only can we suggest which project we think you were working on (via smart keyword matching), but you can mouse over blocks of time and RescueTime will tell you what you were doing during that time.

Here’s a screenshot of what entry looks like:

We’ve also enhanced offline time on the assumption that once you start tracking project time, you need the ability to add and edit more granular tasks that might be away from your computer.  The offline popup (if you use it) has more options and an optional detail field.  You can also add/edit offline time with the project time tool shown above.  Here’s what the new offline popup looks like:

Once you have assigned project time (accurately and in a fraction of the time a normal timesheet), you then have project specific reports about how project time breaks down, what the totals are, and how efficient your project really is.  The reports should feel pretty familiar to existing RescueTime users.  For groups, you can easily jump to an hour-by-hour (or day-by-day) timesheet for any user in the system with a handy menu.  Screenshot of the new navigation to the right.

What about Existing RescueTime Customers?

This feature set is a standalone product built on the RescueTime foundation.  It’s available by itself or bundled with the great productivity features that you’ve hopefully grown to love.  Our existing paying customers get the bundled version free of charge … But because these features could be pretty noisy if you don’t want them, the project tracking features are turned off by default.  You can turn them on here.  Existing Solo Light (free) customers don’t get it for free, though if you mention this blog post in an email to me (tony@rescuetime dot com), I’ll try to wrangle you a discount on the upgrade at very least.

What’s Next?

As with all things at RescueTime, this is just a beginning.  The next (and most important!) step is to hear what you have to say.  What’s confusing, what’s missing, what would make it great for you?

There’s a great roundtable discussion on “Technology Overload” on a recent PBS Mediashift show featuring Leif Hansen (follow him on Twitter here: @leifhansen). The whole show is 25 minutes, but if you skip to the second video section titled “Taking Breaks” at 2 min 30 sec there’s a nice mention of RescueTime by Leif (another panelist chimes in with “It’s brilliant!”).

Technology overload is something we here at RescueTime are acutely aware of.  Every day we’re being introduced to new products and new bits of information– all of these require time.  Purveyors of distraction and “info porn” (our affectionate name for news and blogs) are scientifically optimizing their sites to grab more of our time and attention and we’re all pretty ill-equipped to deal with it.  So how are people dealing with this kind of overload?  They’re working longer hours, catching up on weekends, and taking fewer vacations.

Virtual teams are increasingly popular.  One of the software companies I most admire has an entirely virtual company of over 40 people spread all over the world cranking out outstanding software.  Yet the concept is terrifying to a lot of managers.   Highlights of the big fears include:

• Will productivity go down?  There are a lot of distractions at home and presumably the workplace is optimized for workplace productivity better than home, right?
• Will we lose that intangible synergy that you get working in the same room with other folks?
• Will I, as a manager, be able to have a sense of whether folks are working?  Of what they are working on?
• Will we still feel like a team?

The RescueTime product team is a small one (5 people), but we think this is big enough to run an experiment… For this entire week, we’ll all be working from our homes.  Here are the questions we’ll be answering at the end of the week (many of them will have juicy data bits, thanks to RescueTime):

• Do we end up spending more time in aggregate on our productive tasks?  In theory, having no commute, no walk to lunch, and no drive-by interruptions in the office wil actually result in more minutes spent doing actual product development (or more free time!).
• Does communication time go up radically?  Without the ability to interrupt our teammates, we’ll have to resort to emailing and IMing.  How much time will this suck up?
• Is our total work-day longer?  Are we replacing our commute times with computer time or free time?
• Does our work day become more spread out?  Working from home presumably makes it easier to punt work when you hit a wall.  Does this happen?  If it does, do people make it up at other times during the day?
• (Subjective) How does the change FEEL?  Do we feel less creative?  Collaborative? Connected?  Does it effect how much we like (or don’t like) our jobs?

Stay tuned– early next week I’ll be posting a graph-heavy post with the results!

share team status, show off top performers, and more

We’ve had substantial user interest in ways of sharing and re-using their RescueTime data. True to our principles of keep-it-simple, we’ve published a way to very easily and safely share views of your data. These features have been live for over a month now, and some of you have already found and done great things with them– thank you! Here I’d thought I’d outline the process and some example use cases to help undertand how you can take your data further.

Although sharing common underlying code, there are two different paths to API data, with two different intentions: embedding charts and raw data access.

Path 1: Super Easy! Embed a Chart

As you use our new, improved, faster, more flexible reports browser, when you come across a slicing and dicing you particularly like, just click the Embed button, found right under the chart. Grab the snippet, and stick it in your blog, or your intranet, or wherever you want to publish it. Note that you can put as many as you like on the same page. Some of our clients have built team dashboards on their corporate intranets where anyone can go to see the pulse of the organization. Some publish these on their websites to show off their performance. Some live blog examples include: www.tonywright.com, Chris Barrow’s Blog, TheG2.net Blog and node.to.

Behind the scenes, this sets up an access key for you and sets privileges on it: when you paste this snippet onto your blog or intranet, anyone trying to steal your info using this key can only get exactly what it already shows. Note that in the snippet you can tweak certain aspects of the chart.

Also note that while your report view in your browser is fixed to the date you are looking at it, your embedded chart will continue to update with whatever is current. The timeframe is saved– as in “a week” or “a day” but not the specific date.

Path 2: Get Funky With Your Data

We’ve released an API targeted a making it easier for users to obtain alternate perspectives on their data, or to re-use it in other applications in a programmatic way. The current interface offered is based around a read-only http query core that models your data in ways users are accustomed to from RescueTime’s existing report views. We’re working on some language-specific convenience wrappers around this query API, and the Python library is complete. Ruby, Java, and Javascript are in the plans.

The first step is to go to the “Embeds & Data API” link from the bottom of your logged in session. From there you can “Setup Data API” to create a key for raw data access. Instead of output being formatted for charts, instead you pick JSON or CSV output, which you can then parse and reformat however you please. You can also parameterize your requests to change what is returned, without needing new keys– you can change date, search key words, specific application names, among other things.

There is a security model around the key providing data scope control and access safety, based on the same key system used by embedding. In this case, a switch is flipped that allows parameterization– so it removes that “can only see what browse view saw” restriction that embed has. It is assumed you will keep these more privileged keys private. But you can always monitor traffic and disable a key if you believe someone is using it who shouldn’t be. You can also set basic network restrictions around the key, to lock it down to access for just your machines.

A Reference Implementation

You can see what we did with the API in our reference implementation hosted on Google’s Appengine. It uses all the aboved methods and API tools in one page. All of the code for it is available for download.

As we get ready to launch some really really cool tools that will allow to you to block the distracting parts of the web, some of our team is starting to look forward to our next major initiative…  Projects!

RescueTime does a great job of tracking time, but doesn’t really do a very good job of allowing you to bucket that time into projects.  This isn’t an easy problem– lots of time (like email and Google.com) is difficult to automagically bucket into projects.  But for all of the people who are laboring under the yoke of painstaking (yet still horribly subjective and inaccurate) timesheets, we’re hoping to be a solution.  And, of course, all of the managers who are trying to make sense of this timesheet data, we’re hoping to help you out as well!

So PLEASE- chip in with your thoughts.  You can weigh in here in the comments if you want, but (IF you are interested in RescueTime tracking time on projects), we’d love to have you fill out this super short survey:

Please click here to fill out the survey (it’ll just take a sec!)

You have our promise the it is (at worst) only moderately boring and will truly give you a hand in shaping the product to be what you want it to be.