I guess it's called "lifelogging" now...
March 9, 2016 3:03 PM Subscribe
I'm looking for an easier way of awarding and tracking brownie points, with several snowflakes...
A few years ago I started giving out "AndyPoints" to friends as a recurring joke. Over time, these points have become an informal way of recognizing anything and everything awesome, inspiring or otherwise good made by my friends and acquaintances.
Fortunately, this has fostered a healthy competition for points across several circles of friends, but in order to maintain competitiveness I must be able to award and track points with a minimum of hassle, and this is where I need your help.
Right now the setup is something like this:
1. Alice does something worthy of AndyPoints
2. I send a tweet with a specific hashtag awarding AP and stating a brief reason for it ("+10 AP for @Alice for sharing an awesome article...")
3. The IFTTT robot picks up the tweet and adds a new row to the private AndyPoints spreadsheet on Google Drive with a verbatim copy of the tweet
4. Once in a blue moon I actually update the Public AndyPoints spreadsheet by manually adding the totals and the data in the private spreadsheet.
5. Delete used rows in the spreadsheet and announce via social media that the rankings have been updated
There are many drawbacks to this method, the worst being, IMO, the fact that (a) I have to put up some kind of personal information out there for non-twitter friends so I can recognize their names in the rankings ("+5 AP for Bob for..."); (b) I have to manually update the totals, which introduces an extra step where mistakes can happen, and (c) AP awarding can't be seen in real time, which hinders competition
Is there any way to make this better? I need an automated way of awarding and tracking AP. Bonus points for:
a) Being as unobtrusive as possible (as easy and quick as sending a tweet)
b) Ability to be used from an Android phone/app (I don't trust my memory enough to award points when I get back home)
c) Ability to publish rankings in or near real time
d) Free-as-in-beer
Also, I've looked on the internet and the closest I've come to a solution is this list and Daytum, but still have some of the drawbacks of the current system.
A few years ago I started giving out "AndyPoints" to friends as a recurring joke. Over time, these points have become an informal way of recognizing anything and everything awesome, inspiring or otherwise good made by my friends and acquaintances.
Fortunately, this has fostered a healthy competition for points across several circles of friends, but in order to maintain competitiveness I must be able to award and track points with a minimum of hassle, and this is where I need your help.
Right now the setup is something like this:
1. Alice does something worthy of AndyPoints
2. I send a tweet with a specific hashtag awarding AP and stating a brief reason for it ("+10 AP for @Alice for sharing an awesome article...")
3. The IFTTT robot picks up the tweet and adds a new row to the private AndyPoints spreadsheet on Google Drive with a verbatim copy of the tweet
4. Once in a blue moon I actually update the Public AndyPoints spreadsheet by manually adding the totals and the data in the private spreadsheet.
5. Delete used rows in the spreadsheet and announce via social media that the rankings have been updated
There are many drawbacks to this method, the worst being, IMO, the fact that (a) I have to put up some kind of personal information out there for non-twitter friends so I can recognize their names in the rankings ("+5 AP for Bob for..."); (b) I have to manually update the totals, which introduces an extra step where mistakes can happen, and (c) AP awarding can't be seen in real time, which hinders competition
Is there any way to make this better? I need an automated way of awarding and tracking AP. Bonus points for:
a) Being as unobtrusive as possible (as easy and quick as sending a tweet)
b) Ability to be used from an Android phone/app (I don't trust my memory enough to award points when I get back home)
c) Ability to publish rankings in or near real time
d) Free-as-in-beer
Also, I've looked on the internet and the closest I've come to a solution is this list and Daytum, but still have some of the drawbacks of the current system.
Best answer: For making it public, you could use the Numerous app which works well with IFTTT. Set up each person gets their own number and share them with your friends and you're good to go. They can just bring up the app and see each other's totals in real time.
posted by Garm at 10:05 PM on March 9, 2016
posted by Garm at 10:05 PM on March 9, 2016
Best answer: Here's a live example of what you're looking for.
Try it out by copying some of the fake tweets and adding them to the A column. Small note: if you want to add a fake tweet of your own, you'll need to enter it into the cell like this:
="TWEET CONTENT"
so, for instance,
="+30 Points for your, dear @Yuri #Tag #AnotherTag #AndysPoints"
Let me know!
posted by vert canard at 10:05 PM on March 9, 2016
Try it out by copying some of the fake tweets and adding them to the A column. Small note: if you want to add a fake tweet of your own, you'll need to enter it into the cell like this:
="TWEET CONTENT"
so, for instance,
="+30 Points for your, dear @Yuri #Tag #AnotherTag #AndysPoints"
Let me know!
posted by vert canard at 10:05 PM on March 9, 2016
Response by poster: Quick update: I'm having spotty internet access for the next 12-ish hours, but I'll look into these answers ASAP, keep 'em coming!
posted by andycyca at 12:55 PM on March 10, 2016
posted by andycyca at 12:55 PM on March 10, 2016
Response by poster:
Apparently the easiest/best answer is just to update my spreadsheet skills to use my existing setup, although this will take a few extra hours of work. Numerous seems like the automated way to go, considering it can tag offline friends. Maybe there's a way to make these two work together, but I'll have to look into it more closely. Thanks a lot for your suggestions, guys!
posted by andycyca at 11:46 AM on March 12, 2016
>>vert canard: IFTTT should allow you to filter by tag to only copy #AndysPoints tweets into Spreadsheets (that's how it's copying those tweets now, right?)You're right, I forgot to add that bit
Apparently the easiest/best answer is just to update my spreadsheet skills to use my existing setup, although this will take a few extra hours of work. Numerous seems like the automated way to go, considering it can tag offline friends. Maybe there's a way to make these two work together, but I'll have to look into it more closely. Thanks a lot for your suggestions, guys!
posted by andycyca at 11:46 AM on March 12, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
A few ideas. I'd love to help out by the way. It really "shouldn't take too long" (famous last words):
- It'd be useful to adhere to an established tweet format. Say, "+POINTS ... anything here ... @RECIPIENT #AndysPoints" (so: + sign (which is there for fellow humans), number of points, the tweet body including @recipient-twitter-handle, and a consistent tag for all of your point-tweets)
- IFTTT should allow you to filter by tag to only copy #AndysPoints tweets into Spreadsheets (that's how it's copying those tweets now, right?)
- Once the tweets are in your spreadsheet, I would add 1) a string/replace formula that extracts the number of points and 2) who are they awarded to
- Once you have those two pieces of data (number of points + twitter handle), you're almost done. You could create a new sheet in your spreadsheet, and create a formula there to calculate the sum of points per user. You can then make that sheet public. It will be as real time as IFTTT is in copying your tweets! The other sheet (which has all of your tweets) will not be shared (it doesn't matter if it is shared, but it's nicer this way -- or you can make it public for anyone curious).
The only remaining issue is that the points rankings would be per twitter username, instead of using your friends' real names. If you're giving out points to the same group of people over and over, that's easy -- you can create a lookup table with twitter usernames and the corresponding first names / nicknames. If you're giving out points left and right so to speak :-) it's a bit harder. You could integrate a Twitter API module into Spreadsheets which fetches whatever first name they have configured in Twitter (which might not work for everyone). I think that it's a smaller issue (we could get started on the above first and just seeing that work would be great). Let me know what you think!
Oh, and MeMail would probably be better for further discussions. I just wanted to post this here in case it could help anyone else. Three cheers!
posted by vert canard at 7:29 PM on March 9, 2016