I think the biggest problem with time keeping systems is that they counts up, but our lives are not infinite. For us, time is really counting down.<p>After trying to reconcile the solar year with decimal time in a way that made sense, I abandoned my effort and created a time keeping system with 1095 units of time of time per year (1098 in leap years).<p>The units are 8 hours long, because no progress on hard problems is made in an hour.<p>I call it Maker Time:<p>The web site is @ <a href="http://willholloway.net/makertime.html" rel="nofollow">http://willholloway.net/makertime.html</a>
A JSON API is @ <a href="http://makertime.willholloway.net/api/current" rel="nofollow">http://makertime.willholloway.net/api/current</a><p>Checking the current Maker Time reminds me that I have 1060 - 349 (for sleep) = 711 opportunities to make cool things this year.
When people say Bitcoin is a money standard for the internet, it reminds me of this. A time standard for the internet, similar to UTC but human-friendly.<p>A few things worked against its adoption.<p>First, it was too proprietary. A modern initiative based on open standards would have a much better chance of gaining a foothold in niche communities, much like Bitcoin.<p>Second, it was before its time (no pun intended). The web was already popular, but not very real-time. There was some chat, but it was pretty geeky, not like Skype or Facebook IM now. And hardly any videoconferencing or live-streaming. And not as much distance working as happens now. So there wasn't that much demand for syncing time.<p>Third, digital phones were locked down by the manufacturers and carriers (watches too). It would be hard for a grassroots movement to grow if no-one could make apps supporting the new time standard.
I've always loved this idea. It just makes sense. People argue against the "circular notation" of a clock face and how it relates to 60 minutes/seconds, but all that analog stuff is dead.
It was a nice idea but I think Swatch made a big mistake by taking their headquarters as the base to calculate it.<p>It needed to be an independant concept to bring other companies/competitors on board.
Handy tip: one .beat (or a milliday, if you like) is about 1.5 minutes. This means that one percent of one day is about fifteen minutes. Try thinking of tasks in terms of percentages of a day. You spend about 30 percent, give or take, sleeping. You spend 30-40% working most days. How does one spend the remaining 30-40%? One percent showering. Three or four percent preparing meals. Adds up.
Lots of things would be easier if everybody uses the same time.<p>It could stay the 24h/day time format, but timezones are a pain - I always have to recalculate them for local time. Why couldn't everybody work with UTC?<p>And by the way: when will we finally get rid of the daylight savings time?!?
There's a great collection if decimal time ideas, many of which are linked at the bottom of that wikipedia page. I personally always liked the idea of making 1 day into the base unit. Then 0.5 would give you noon, 0.75 is 6pm. It seemed less arbitrary than making a unit into a 10th of a day, since that has no value except in reference to a day.
I remember those, I don't think enough people realised/needed the utility of them at the time for it to gain critical mass. Not that many people in the population at large, have friends all over the world that they need to have accurate timesync with.<p>It also might have benefited from being based on UTC instead of a decimal time. It was awkward to describe any time below an hour as you needed to break down into fractions of a beat to describe regular time intervals like 15 or 30 minutes. Whereas maybe a UTC-beat watch with 86400 seconds/beats in a day could be more relevant? Probably not, it'd still have huge hurdles to overcome with the network effect, apathy and such.
I was a 14 year old who attended the initial launch at MIT. I remember at the time thinking: why have a random synthetic time, perhaps we can just accept GMT as internet time.<p>I still don't understand why you'd have Beil Mean Time - perhaps I haven't grown.
Ever since I heard about this, it became an exciting idea to me.<p>60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day is just a mess for doing math and analyzing how long things take and what of our life they make up.<p>Eliminate all the timezone conversion nonsense and you've got another huge plus... the time system will eventually change, sooner or later. Coordinating the change will be difficult, but it's too obvious not to happen.
I've always found it funny that PHP has this built in, I think it's nice when tech is weirdly political and opinionated, obviously in ways that don't screw things up.