Today’s Killer App Idea: Flickr for Dieting
From time to time, I’ve used FitDay to lose a little weight. It does an okay job of enabling you to track the calories you eat and burn. The Web app doesn’t seem to have changed in years, though, and the food choices are extremely American (lots of junk food, no tabouleh).
More importantly, FitDay lacks a strong user community, and doesn’t enable users to share diet-related data (recipes, before and after photos, weekly diet plans, etc). Given the success of the social aspects of Weight Watchers, and a general trend toward sharing personal information online, I think the world needs a Flickr for dieting. It needs to be fun and easy to use, have tagging and RSS feeds and foster strong connections between users.
I was mentioning this to Kris recently, and he pointed out that the 2005 business plan is “Flickr for X“.
July 19th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I actually got pitched this last week. Anything to do with recipes is a good idea.
And of course there’s a module. I am, of course, #1 for Easy Tomato Salad. Enjoy!
July 19th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
FitDay for the most part does do the trick - I’m with you on that one. You can enter all your custom foods and the reports offered are useful.
Tags would be handy for searching foods and ingredients submitted to the community. Not sure if I would use a “Flickresque” site for recipes though. Then again, perhaps in no time there would be some incredible chefs launching groups.
July 19th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Weightwatchers has an online membership available which does most of what you have in mind. Of course it’s $20/mo but I used it for seven months and it totally did the trick.
July 22nd, 2005 at 7:30 am
No tabouleh indeed! Just came across ‘cooked cow head’ on FitDay. Yikes!