Need help planning the weekend?  Go to goby.com.  I just came across this great new search engine that is designed to help people plan their free time.  According to the site it has 2 missions  - providing a superior search experience and help to solve frustrations involved in planning free-time activities.

According to its FAQ section it does this by creating a rich information model that provides semantic organization and lends structure to unstructured data. It searches, sorts, filters, maps, and contextualizes heterogeneous web data.  “Contextualizing heterogeneous web data” – that’s right!!

Now whenever a new search engine comes around I (like most people) tend to play around with it briefly and then usually go back to my habit of using my favorite search engine.  It’s a habit that’s hard to break.  Passive loyalty or inertia as the loyalty marketing folks would call it.  Goby however has a better chance of breaking that habit.  That’s not because of the contextualization of heterogeneous web data, it’s because it really really works!

It asks 3 simple questions : what do you want to do, where and when.  Here’s an example.  I have a friend in town from Europe this weekend who likes indie music so I typed in indie music, Brooklyn, tomorrow.  I got back a perfectly clean list of indie music concerts in Brooklyn.  When I try that on Google I usually get a whole range of search results I need to sort through in order to cobble together a simple list like the one I got back from Goby.

I could of course have easily looked at TimeOut for a list of indie concerts in Brooklyn.  So I tried something a bit more difficult.  How about giving my friend  more of an American experience this weekend?  I typed in Bluegrass, Brooklyn and tomorrow.  Once again I got back a clean list of bluegrass only shows for tomorrow in Brooklyn.  Great! 

Something completely different – learning how to make pumpkin pie (something I had never had before I moved to the US – now I love it).  I typed in pumpkin pie, nyc, tomorrow.  It actually gave me one search return for a pumpkin pie making class in NYC!  I typed in the same words in google and got back 107,000 results but couldn’t see a single pie baking class on the 1^st page.  I typed in “pumpkin pie baking nyc” –  878,000 results, no luck on the 1^st page.  “pumpkin pie baking class nyc” – 838,000 results, again no luck on the 1^st page in the organic search, luckily the Institute of Culinary Education in NY had bought the search term so they had a class under the sponsored links.

If you are looking for something to do in your spare time, Goby is far more efficient than Google.  It returns a much smaller set of highly relevant results.  This creates a far better experience.  Less is more.  This is something we know is true in the physical world.  Having too much choice can be exhausting as this interesting recent behavioral experiment showed for example.  The same holds true for search.  I think I will continue to use Goby in the future.

There has been a spate of new products recently which promise to monitor every aspect of your life.  My favorite is the Zeo Sleep Monitor, pictured above.  With this handy device, you wear a headband while sleeping which monitors your sleep patterns (how often you wake up, the amount of REM you’re getting and so on), and wirelessly transmits them to a base unit on your nightstand for full study in the morning.  (It also doubles as a powerful contraceptive.)

Who could be without such a device, I ask you?

Black & Decker, everyone’s favorite power tool company, have just produced the ‘Power Monitor’, which attaches to your electricity meter and wirelessly transmits data to a handheld unit detailing your household electricity consumption. This allows you to track how much power each appliance uses so that you can lead a greener, cheaper life.

Of course, there’s the good old Nike + iPod which allows you to track your workout data on your iPod and then synch to your computer, so that you can capture your data, graph it and, presumably, blog about it.

For someone who found the pedometer exciting, these are truly important breakthroughs.

All of these products amount to a trend, it seems to me.  We instinctively realize that what gets measured, gets fixed.  We don’t trust our own judgements and so want to measure it objectively.

The mainstreaming of personal data is likely to make people more comfortable with the idea of ongoing measurement  generally.  What’s really significant is the deep personalization of the data.  Once we start  to match private stats with addressable media, lots of possibilities emerge.  Could Ambien provide a web app that links to the Zeo?  Could Con Ed send data from the Black & Decker Power Monitor to your smart phone?  Nike has, of course, already built an online community around Nike + iPod.

It will also cause a tremendous leap forward in addressable advertising.  People taking medications could get compliance prompts (as in Nudge).  Appliance manufacturers could send energy saving tips.

Measuring such marketing will be a lot richer too and a lot more useful.  It will take the principles of behavioral marketing to new levels.  And it can all be done in your sleep.