Life-logging app Saga has gone social, so you can now share the personal story of your past, present and future.  It’s yet another step in taking life-logging mainstream, thanks to the proliferation of smart devices and a growing level of comfort with putting personal data to good use.  A recent Pew report indicates that consumers are increasingly interested in life-logging, with a surprising seven out of 10 people participating in the movement.  The majority of life-loggers still use paper, so Saga’s hopping on the life-logging momentum to deliver better tools to power this movement.

Launched in public beta last year, Saga initially let iOS users to keep track of various aspects of their lives including locations they’ve visited, workout progress and trip travel time, all of which can be viewed in a beautifully oriented timeline.  You can see your past and present activities, and because the app is intuitive in its ongoing analysis, it can even predict your future.

Because Saga is able to track your life in a well designed lifelog, it would be a shame if others couldn’t see just how beautiful your life really is.  With today’s update, Saga users can share their lifelogs effortlessly and stay in touch with the people who matter most.  Life-logging used to be a solo effort, but A.R.O., the development firm behind Saga, believes that by making Saga social, it can help people stick to their goals through social accountability.

Everything’s better with friends

“So many things are better when they’re social. Lifelogging is no exception. It’s in our nature to share the best and worst parts of our lives, and Saga is how you tell the most authentic story of your life. Simply put, Lifelogging is best with friends,” said Andy Hickl, A.R.O.’s co-founder and CEO. “Social lifelogging has helped me get to know the people in my life on a completely new level.”

Saga’s update features Remember Everything, which automatically keep track of places and activities everyday; Reveal the Real You, which automatically share true life adventures with friends, family, and followers; Gain Insight, which lets users explore personal analytics to discover trends and uncover interesting facts about people and places; add Snaps or Photos to save memorable photos to a lifelog, or add photos from the phone’s camera roll; Create Bundles, which allows users to curate and share trips and adventures by bundling favorite places into collections; and Collect Traits which rewards users for being unique, interesting, or just plain awesome.

You can also connect Saga with other  self-tracking applications such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Fitbit, Tripit, BodyMedia, Withings, MyFitnessPal, and more to add rich data to your lifelogs.

It’s an interesting diversion from the Facebook way of social story-telling, where it’s relatively easy to curate and even fictionalize the portrayal of our lives.  But with Saga, “there’s an opportunity to be authentic and firmly place yourself in the non-fiction side,” Hickl says.  “I can share out not just who I want to be, but who I actually am.”

Saga-gone-social is decidedly different from other social collection platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, which provide insight on consumer intent rather than what’s going on in the here-and-now.  Contextualizing that in the ongoing lifelog of individual users could have far greater implications than merely indicating one’s likes online.

More friends? More privacy

 With the additional layer of social interaction, Saga also had to up the ante on privacy features.  For starters, the social sharing feature is disabled upon installing the app, and before you can enable that feature, you need to set your sharing permissions.  You can organize followers into groups, and set different permissions for each group.  There’s also a delay you can add for when data’s shared, be it two hours, eight hours or a week.  Another privacy perk is the ability to choose, in very broad buckets, which kinds of data sets you’d like to share: work or personal.

One other great thing about this update is that it resolves the issue of battery drainage.  Since it’s a life-logging app potentially running 24/7, it has the tendency to take much of your device’s battery.  With this update, you can now enjoy logging your life without worrying about draining the juice of your device.

You can download the latest version of Saga here.