Friday for Android: Analytics engine that indexes your life for self discovery

Our smartphones keep tabs on pretty much everything we do these days. Ponder on this thought for a second. Each time you tap, swipe, receive a phone call, share content with friends via social networks, interact with apps, listen to music, grant access to your geographical location – literally all your device interactions leave valuable traces in software logs, caches and databases. So why not drill through this wealth of information and put it in useful context?

That’s what Friday does for you. It’s a new Android app from India-based startup Dexetra. They’ve been working on it for the past sixteen months. Friday is both a search engine and timeline for your life, a journal of sorts you don’t have to write. It has a simple goal: Facilitate self discovery and provide accurate answers to all questions about you.

You can ask Friday the stuff like ‘where was I last Thursday?’, quickly filter email messages by date and time received or check out all the photos received from a specific person. The real fun starts when using broad set of criteria to screen information. Remember the song you were playing but want to know the calls you received while you were listening to it? Wanna see the places you visited and the photos you took during a trip on the map? Places at which you made calls during that trip to San Diego? Cannot recall where you were when boss called a week ago?

That’s what filters are for. You can create your own filters by either asking simple questions (example: Emails on Monday) or creating really complex queries and further narrow down the results using categories such as “SMS” to display only SMS snaps based on your query. Filters can be nested too, allowing for very specific queries, such as “my phone calls while charging”. You can create as many custom filters as you like as a way of getting an at-a-glance overview of yourself and past activities that interest you. Custom tags are also allowed and they improve search results, too. Auto Tag is another handy feature which aims to guestimate the context of your snaps using a preset list of common tags. Tags enable some powerful possibilities. For example, create the “Hawaii holiday” tag when on vacation and disable it when you get back home. As a result, every photo you have taken, music you have listened to, places you have visited and other stuff will be automatically labeled with the “Hawaii holiday” tag for easy searching later.

Planned features include cloud support for browsing your life snapshots from any device and intelligent activity suggestions based on the patterns in your life the app figures out. The Friday app is currently in private alpha (limited invites available here). They select and invite new alpha users every Friday and you can invite up to three friends in order to boost your chances of getting an invite.