Can online networking and web 2.0 technologies help with personal fitness?

Any keywords you can think of, that I can use in my queries, are also welcome. English is only my third language so sometimes I don’t remember or know the proper terms. ^^

There are a lot of weight loss/healthy living sites that leverage a social network. SparkPeople is one of the largest. I would advise you to join with a free account so that you can look through and analyze it yourself. It features discussions from members about all sorts of fitness and weight loss questions, no doubt the answers to those questions help change people’s fitness towards the better. It features tools to track your weight loss goal, the foods you eat, and your progress. You can create various goals and share them with other members. There’s a lot more in this site, I think it would be great to look at as a case study. Maybe you can post on their message boards and ask for an interview with any willing members, see if they feel the site helps them with their fitness goals, etc.

It might be interesting to look into Weight Watchers success. It features a lot of real life web 2.0 analogies and could provide insight as to why these work (meetings for discussion groups, the point system). This interesting article talks about how Weight Watchers and the web-based tool make dieting like an RPG, and considering how popular RPGs are today (World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, EVE Online) this could prove insightful into your topic of discussion.

Personally I think a lot of the Web 2.0 success comes from having someone to talk with when you’re challenged or unmotivated, and to share tips and tricks. A lot also comes from sharing of knowledge either through articles, or more interestingly by having members contribute calorie content for various foods (similarly, statistics for various exercises), and having high quality tools to access and use this data.

I posted about this on my blog a few days ago. I sent you a link to it privately. Feel free to use whatever resources you want. I have found the iPhone apps to be the most user-friendly only because the iPhone is so easy to keep in hands reach.

@dynamicduo – Yes there are many sites like that and I have probably joined most of them. I should probably have mentioned that, now I have joined SparkPeople as well. :)
Your idea about doing a case study is a good one, however I’m not sure I could do it well enough. I will look into it tomorrow and see if there is enough time and if I can find any good methods for representing the data and in particular how to gain the most relevant data.

The Games Without Frontiers article was really interesting. Making fitness more fun and game like is a great idea. Gamercize and WiiFit are great examples of such attempts. This is however more related to exertainment as they call it and not web 2.0, but those two have many things in common. If you combine the two, and also mobility, I think you could create some interesting concepts with great appeal.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ve added some of those to my brainstorming list.

@mrjadkins – That was a good blog post. Btw, I had no idea you should drink a glas of water every 90 minute. ^^ Anyway. I am really fascinated by how people use twitter to make themselves accountable. I’ve been following some hashtag “communities” on twitter and get updates in realtime from my client in the form of screen notifications. Pretty cool if I say so myself. I’ve also joined Gyminee, and some other fitness sites, and have it post to my twitter account when I meet a goal or do a workout.