DailyBurn.com
DailyBurn is another social health tracking website that has an easy to use interface. It allows tracking of body weight, nutrition, and workouts. You can set challenges, connect with others for motivation, and socialize in the forums. The unique aspects about this website is that it allows contributions of custom recipes and workouts, and lets everyone use them. So you can select a workout that others have created and see feedback about it. Or, customize your own. There are workouts created by licensed trainers, but you have to upgrade to a PRO account to see them. With a PRO account, you can track fiber, sodium, cholesterol, and potassium along with total calories, fat, carbohydrates, and protein that come with a free account. Though limiting in both cases, most won’t regard detailed micronutrient data as important anyway. Unfortunately it does not split macronutrients into the various types (e.g. MUFA, PUFA, etc).
One thing I don’t approve of are their “facts” advertising their PRO accounts, such as:
PRO Fact: PRO users lose 20% more weight than free users.PRO Fact: PRO users burn 3x more Cals than free users.PRO Fact: PRO users lift over 2x more weight than free users.
Proof of concept: Igor the Google Wave reference manager robot
Google Wave is still a few months away for non developers, but already a bot, Igor, can manage a reference list and extract citations from PubMed, Connotea and CiteULike. All you have to do is type (cite topic, author, journal, etc) and it will find the reference you want, add it to a list, and numerically cite it in your text. To fully appreciate how cool this is, check out the video at:
http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2009/07/igor_a_google_wave_robot_to_ma.html
No doubt there will be many bots like this to choose when Wave is publicly available.
Three micro-podcasting services
For times when you are without a computer, or just want to start a conversation using social media with your voice, there are several options that post directly to web services after leaving a phone message. Here are my top 3:
- http://www.friendboo.com/- new and simple, no need to create an account (use Friendfeed credentials). Posts to your friendfeed account.
- http://www.dial2do.com/-my favorite, it is able to post to multiple microblogging platforms (including twitter and friendfeed), blogs, and also text, send emails, check and add to your todo list (services like rememberthemilk are supported), add notes, translate, listen to the weather forecast, and more all using your voice.
- http://audioboo.fm/- primarily for iphone users, but others can use: http://phoneboo.audioboo.fm/.
These tools are a more personal way to communicate with acquaintances.
Google Reader gets social
Google Reader, already my favorite way to follow news, blogs, medline queries, and more, added new social features that makes sharing feeds much easier, allows for strict control over who can see them, and adds a “likes” feature which shows other readers who like the same things you are reading.
A good review of the new features is here: http://siliconangle.com/ver2/2009/07/16/google-reader-makes-reading-more-social/
Now, with existing features like comments, and notes, Reader becomes an important social networking tool to find like minded people. It is not more than just a RSS reader, it is evolving into a great social media tool.
Waving in the new form of online communication
I’ve been watching for good resources to describe the potential use for the upcoming Google Wave, coming “later this year,” for scientists.
The best I have found, linking to other perspectives, courtesy Björn Brembs: http://bjoern.brembs.net/news.php?item.521.3
A combination of microblog/blog/wiki/email/instant messenger and more, it will no doubt be a great tool to centralize incoming and control outogoing information, while facilitating collaborations.
G.ho.st virtual computer
G.ho.st virtual computer is in public beta today, with a similar look to standard operating systems. If you are looking for a web interface to use with different computers to backup, store, share files, read email or RSS feeds, privately browse the web and more, G.ho.st appears to be one of the best choices as of now.
Check out the demo on their homepage.
Cotweet for businesses
If you own a health related business, especially if it is based primarily on the web, cotweet is a perfect solution to ensure (potential) customers remain engaged.
Instead of each employee creating a separate twitter account, cotweet lets multiple users tweet from one account, each with an identifier called a cotag. Multiple accounts can also be mananged, if needed. @replies on twitter are sent to whoever is set to “on duty,” so replying is never accidentally duplicated.
Email notifications are an option when @replies are sent to your account, and replies may be assigned to different users for followup.
These are just a few of the many features cotweet offers.
Seesmic – a desktop and now web based twitter browser
A heads up on a major update from seesmic’s twitter browser, with an upgrade to their desktop version and a great new web version: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/07/seesmics-web-offering-is-best-twitter.html
Check it out at http://www.seesmic.com
Heavy competition for tweetdeck (which I use), but this web version could come in very handy.
For those who are new to twitter and these browsers, they are a great way to organize tweets into groups. After you follow a large number of people, following from the web interface becomes difficult; some tweet often, some not so much. With Seesmic and Tweetdeck (and a couple others), you can create groups to ensure you see the important ones.
Lazyfeed – a new way to read blogs
Lazyfeed is a new live web based RSS reader that brings you blog posts based on keywords, instead of subscribing to specific feeds.
It is currently in closed beta but I was lucky enough to get an invite from them yesterday.
After playing with it a bit, I am unconvinced of its usefulness over classical readers for science based professions. For example, some keywords simply bring me 10s of stories covering the same issue. While this may be what some people are looking for (different perspectives), it is difficult to quickly gauge the quality of the blogs. For this, I rely on subscriptions based on personal research and recommendations from connections on social media (twitter, friendfeed, etc), and I find that I read almost all posts from quality bloggers.
Each keyword feed also isn’t consolidated into a single feed; hopefully further versions will give this as an option.
It would be most useful to track major media news coverage as of now.
I will update with further developments or better examples of how it can be used differently than current readers.
This blog now has a live feed, and yours can too
If you are subscribed to this blog, you will now receive posts the second I publish them thanks to new technology called PubSubHubbub.
Feedburner has added support for it as of yesterday: http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2009/07/whats-all-hubbub-about-pubsubhubbub.html as well as Google Reader.
Which means anyone (if you use feedburner, and plenty of other ways to come) can ensure their feeds get pushed to RSS readers (that support the technology) as soon as a post is published, so you have better control when your readers receive your blogs.
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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 -