FitOrbit – Fitness 2.0
Last week, FitOrbit.com launched, offering online (customized) personal training.
Being involved with various message boards, personal training typically occurs through email or phone exchanges, so this may offer a better organzational alternative.
Though, one of the main advantages of having a personal trainer is that the client receives demonstration or technique correction on their activity, and motivation of someone pushing them. This site may be better suited for non beginners looking for professional advice.
Here is a good article on it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/22/fitorbit-launches-with-heavy-backers-connects-you-to-real-personal-fitness-trainers-online/
It can get quite expensive: from $9.99/week for 6 months to $29.99/week for 1 week. It is assuring that trainers sign contracts and list credentials.
Opera Unite and Social Collaboration
Opera Unite was launched 10 days ago, and offers an alternative to cloud services, which host intellectual property on their servers. It works within the Opera browser, which historically has been innovative software.
Unite allows for local sharing with contacts instead of uploading to a server. This can produce easy project collaboration by sharing a specified folder, with other options to open a chat room, a place for leaving notes, or even user your computer as a server. Other applications will be developed but extras are not are currently available.
Disadvantages include that you need the opera browser installed and the Unite service to be running to be sharing your files, and file modification is not live- they must be edited individually then shared.
Video instructions:
Collaboration with Google Voice
Google Voice launched publically today, since I had a GrandCentral account before they changed it to Voice, i’ve had my account for awhile and have had time to play around.
Relevant to the Health 2.0 scene, is the potential for this service to facilitate communication. I would never post by cell # publically, but Google Voice has widgets I can create and post on the web, which connect chatters anonymously to my phone. In a classroom setting, for example, a professor could place a widget on his/her webpage so students can call with questions, and have the calls route both to the office phone, cell phone, and home phone if desired, improving odds of a connection. He/she wouldn’t even have to take the time to listen to it, as the calls are all nicely transcribed by Voice, with the option to send email alerts with the transcription. With one click, the professor could reply by phone connection or email, saving time looking up numbers or opening clients.
Since Voice has SMS, texting is easy and efficient as well, though unfortunately a widget does not exist to send a text without giving away your phone number.
You can extensively control how your calls are routed, and control greetings and routes by how your contacts are grouped. Maybe you want professional contacts to be routed to an office phone, and personal calls to your cell. Or, even listen in while callers are leaving a message to gauge importance.
I’ve heard rumor of google trying to allow transfer of cell #’s to Voice, which would eliminate the hassle of getting a new (free) one. Will update if it happens.
The interface is much like Gmail, and will likely integrate nicely with Google Wave, coming later this year.
Sharing files on FriendFeed
According to today’s FF blog post, you can now attach files to posts. With the number of scientists on FF, this will undoubtedly make it a great repository for research papers.
This has sparked a couple of debates on sharing papers in FF.
Try it out @ friendfeed.com
Tutorials on how to use social services like friendfeed are in the works for those who are new.
Pubfeed – a new Selective Dissemination of Information Service
A new SDI, Pubfeed, was launched in April of this year, information about it in this blog post:
… It is essentially a meta-search tool that just re-queries search engines periodically to check for new results based on user’s favorite publications. The current implementation uses the DBLP and Google Scholar databases but I hope to add other data sources in the future. In a sense, Pubfeed is actually quite dumb because all the heavy lifting in finding relevant publications is done by DBLP and Google Scholar and Pubfeed just aggregates their results with some basic filters.
It has a simple but attractive interface, that aggregates results based on papers you select, and lists feeds publicly to subscribe to via the site or RSS. You can add to your favorites as they come in and it changes the results on the fly. I have setup a couple of queries to see how it works compared to PubCrawler and see what sort of results I get.
Google scholar seems to be a bit slow on indexing/listing new papers, something to keep in mind.
Will update when I have more information.
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Join the Nutrition 2.0 FriendFeed room to further discuss these topics: http://friendfeed.com/nutrition20 -
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Join the Nutrition 2.0 FriendFeed room to further discuss these topics: http://friendfeed.com/nutrition20 -