How to track where you go with Moves & Gyroscope
For tracking the places you go, how you travel between them, and where you spend your time, we recommend setting up Moves, a free app available in the app store.
It is similar to Foursquare in that you check into places you visit, but provides more detail and can be done at the end of the day. Once you identify places in Moves, they will show up in your Gyroscope timeline and we can start building the complete history of your life.
How to tag the places you visit
While Moves has basic step tracking, that is not its main feature. We use it to create a timeline of your life and track all of the locations you’ve been to.
By default, Moves will just save a map coordinate of where you were, but no details about the location. With tons of different spots in the same location, it is hard to accurately guess where you were — so you’ll need to fill that in. It will show grey text and “Unknown Place.” To complete the process, you’ll have to choose the location from a list of nearby spots.
It takes about 15 seconds to add and is generally the first option on the list.
Conveniently, if you go back to a place you’ve previously identified — like your home or office or a restaurant you frequent — it will automatically guess and fill it in. Sometimes it gets it wrong, for example if a restaurant is right next to your office, but it often works accurately and saves a lot of time.
At the end of the day or whenever you have some free time (waiting in line is a great opportunity), try opening the app and spend a minute identifying all of the places you visited.
Walking & Travel
In addition to the places, Moves will track how you go between places. We use more detailed sources like Fitbit to answer how many steps you had — but Moves helps us answer questions like where you walked. We use this to make beautiful maps of where you went each week.
Walking and running is picked up automatically, but other means of transportation, like airplanes or trains, cannot be automatically detected. To be tracked properly, they’ll need to be identified in the same way as places.
Getting Started
Once you download Moves & start using it, you can connect it to Gyroscope to start seeing your data. You can get started at our Setup Guide or connect it from your account settings.
As you visit places and open the Moves app, they should start showing up on your page! Occasionally our site may be delayed, but often it will update your location within a few minutes of opening the Moves app.
Setting up a new app on your phone may seem like a lot of work, but provides lots of information that many of our users find invaluable. Here are some of the many Gyroscope features you will be able to use…
Automatic Workouts
We use the locations data for lots of different things. One common use is passive tracking of workouts. If we see you went somewhere that is classified as a gym or fitness centers, we automatically count that time as a workout.
If there was heart rate activity during that time, we can also show details about that in the app & in your reports.
Passive meal tracking
Food tracking is a complex & messy problem that we have not yet figured out. However, we are starting by automatically highlighting restaurants.
Weekly Reports
At the end of every week, we send an automatic report with an overview of what you did. It combines various data like workouts, steps, computer activity and photos — but the places you go to are the backbone of that info. Places you ate will be highlighted in the timeline for each day.
Yearly Reports
The Gyroscope Annual Report comes out every year and has a comprehensive analysis of your year. If you’ve been using Moves all year, you will get a lot of interesting info about where you went.
Share from the iPhone App
Our new iPhone app lets you see reports of your activity and share the ones you want. This gives you complete control over your privacy & what other people will see.
Travel reports
Tracking your locations is especially powerful when traveling. From the app, you can see the map by city, or share the story of a specific week.
- Get the Moves app
- Connect it to Gyroscope
- Check out your profile!
Troubleshooting
There are a few things that occasionally go wrong. The most common issue is that a place hasn’t yet been identified in Moves. It may be either blank, or wrongly detected. If you change the details in Moves, the update should show up within a few minutes on Gyroscope.
Another common issue is using Swarm & Moves together. They both provide us with location details for the day. In that case we usually favor the Moves info, since it has useful details about start & end times. That will mean the Foursquare checkins get hidden and won’t show up.
Another frustrating problem is when multiple visits get merged together. For example, if you go for lunch to a place next to your office — it may think you never left and were just at the same place all day. We’re looking into workarounds, but unfortunately there is not much we can do.
In some rare cases, you may need to delete & reconnect your Moves account to get rid of bad data and sync with the latest. This should typically not be necessary, and we suggest you contact us if something seems to be acting strangely.
