Me-trics is a new online service which gives you the tools you need to gather and analyse your own personal set of data. Why? Well you might want to find out if there’s a correlation between the amount of coffee you drink and your mood swings. Or whether your health is affected by lack of exercise. Or any number of personal and useful stats.

Sign up is free, and you can either choose from the default stat options of health, consumption and exercise or choose from a growing set of optional questions to add (like ‘time spent sleeping’). It’s a shame that you can’t literally create your own set of stats to track, but there’s a feature to request the developers to add what you want, which is a kind of useful.

The standard web interface is probably fine if you’ve got the determination to spend time manually adding data points, but us lazy folk are likely to be more enthusiastic when the mobile data entry stuff arrives for the mobile phone. Easy in, easy out is our motto. Once you’ve got a good set of data in there, you can analyse, track and report to your heart’s content.

 

I have a feeling, that like New Year’s resolutions, this is a site that will get people enthusiastic for a while, until they get bored with the data entry part, at which point it’ll gather dust and fade away in people’s memory. The only way to get round this is to make it as no-brainer easy to enter data as possible, rather like RescueTime does for computer use. And that means more than just adding your Twitter data as a feed really. Still it’s an interesting idea.

 Tracking your behavior allows you to find patterns and correlations that are difficult to identify on a day by day basis. You might smoke more when your stress level is higher. You might be happier on days that you spend less time online. Or, you might discover that you really haven’t been trying to be healthier… at least on the days you drink… you know, all of them.