Most of us have seen how something like Mint can be useful tool to better understand our spending habits when we compare it with others or Nike+ also us to compare our training performance with others.
We are obviously going to see more of the benefits of collective data over time and especially with the data coming from mobile devices.
Mobile Logger is an iPhone application developed by Robert Carlsen that's designed for bicyclist to log their journeys and share the data from those journeys with us. Obviously, the more data that gets input into the system, the better it is for everyone.
While we might all use social media and geo-social applications, the level of data provide is pretty minimal, it's all surface and basic. Clearly, the players have a lot more data than they would care to share with their users and perhaps this something they should look into more. Sharing more data could be useful to users from a comparison perspective and pure insight, it would also enable the players to be seen as more transparent, which is clearly a big issue right now.
Mobile Logger might be one of the first of it's kind beyond Nike+, it goes beyond the basic functionality and uses the phone's microphone to pick up and monitor noise levels which gives a nice indication of traffic flow.
It appears the shine might be off branded applications, but if they were more useful and engaged users around shared data, perhaps they could play a role.
