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Sharing Weight Data with Friends
I would really love to see FatWatch incorporate some sharing of information. I realize this would be a big jump from where the app is now, but it would a big feature addition.
The idea would be to allow you to share your weight information with friends and see how you are doing with them. It's likely a can of worms with tons of edge cases, but could be really cool.
The idea would be to allow you to share your weight information with friends and see how you are doing with them. It's likely a can of worms with tons of edge cases, but could be really cool.
I’m hopeful
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I like this idea!
Tell me when this idea gets some attention.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The company has this under consideration.
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Inappropriate?I am definitely in favor of such a feature, though there are a million ways to do it. I'd really like to leverage what is already out there before I create my own web service. Some ideas I've been considering that might get you where you want:
- sync your weight history with a Google spreadsheet
- sync your weight history with the Hacker's Diet Online
- export chart images to your computer, or allow you to upload them to a website or photo sharing site -
Inappropriate?Not a big fan of using a spreadsheet as the middleman. It would be nice if there was a fairly generic hook to "post your weight" to different services, since there are a lot that do it. I've used Traineo some and I know that they have an API hook for this.
Perhaps the best approach would be to survey the market and just create coded hooks to report to a few different sources. It would be a shame to pick "just one" and force everyone to have to use that. I like the Hacker's Diet Online, but the user interface is just atrocious.
It would be nice to figure out a way to do this with just a WebDAV URL.
Proposal:
- Have people share a WebDAV URL with write permissions.
- Each person using that automatically exports (in the existing format) their history to that URL with a given filename.
- You can then "subscribe" to any files detected at that URL and have that as a feed.
- Offer ability to "switch views" initially and then extend the visualization/competition options in the application.
I like this since it's decentralized. It reminds me a lot of how Delicious Library shares your library (for example, see my library).
Biggest challenge here is finding WebDAV access that people can share account handles with... hmmm...
I like this direction though, super simple and just relies on files being exchanged. I think making a formal WebService is probably not needed for the simplicity of this and introduces a ton of other challenges.
I’m digging it
- Have people share a WebDAV URL with write permissions.
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Inappropriate?I was thinking about this a little bit more and it's actually easier than I thought. People don't need to share accounts at all. All that you need to do is be able to have a URL that can pull the weight.csv file. So...
- Provide a way for someone to automatically keep a weight.csv file on a server somewhere. iDisk? WebDAV? SFTP? FTP? Note, this is not shared.
- Friends are added (via Address Book would be best) and the URL to their weight.csv file is associated with them.
Done. Each person just keeps there own file updated and there is NO centralized repository. Sweet!
I’m big time excited
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This is one of the best points
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Are you talking about viewing other people's shared weight history on the iPhone with FatWatch? That would have a big impact on the app's overall design.
I think tracking your own weight is a mobile activity (you can take your iPhone with you to the scale) but deeply analyzing it or comparing others' is better left to a "real" computer. So I'm cool with FatWatch uploading your data to a server, but not so much with it downloading other people's data. -
Inappropriate?I'm not sure I agree. Sure you get a bigger screen and all going to the laptop but it is also a big context switch. I'd like to see friend activity in the same context, right on my phone.
I could easily see adding a 5th button along the bottom between "Goal" and "More" called "Friends". Clicking on that tab would show a list of friends you are "subscribed" to and clicking on them simply does the exact same thing that clicking on Log does (including rotate for chart) but it does it with their data.
I have no idea how the app is designed under the covers, but at least this way you could leverage all the existing display code and just point it at a different data set.
Added benefit of automatically sending your own data to a server is having an automated backup solution.
Mark me in the camp of people that would like to keep it on my phone. You could see this extend to showing one of those red numbers over the friends button when it detects your friends have updated (simple HEAD call to the remote URL to detect modified date). I'd much prefer this over logging into another website and dealing with all that...
I think attempting to overlay friends weight data on one chart would be a huge change, and I'm not sure that would even be so cool. I'd rather see each person independently. Just my $0.02. -
Inappropriate?Okay, I've now gotten married to this approach and love it. :-) I'm probably way too far down the rabbit hole and will now insist that any other approach is rubbish. :-P
Let me try to sell with a few more points:
- I love having the sharing files be simple URL's. Why? You could send an email (created for you by FatWatch) to someone in your address book that has a URL that links straight to FatWatch. Something like fatwatch://foo.bar.com/weight.csv and then register FatWatch.app to handle that URL prefix. Awesome!
- I still like this all being on the device. Imagine a personal trainer using this with several clients. They wouldn't have the time to sit down at a computer and do all this, instead they could just tap on FatWatch and get updated data for the client that just showed up.
- I also like the idea of the FatWatch sharing inside the app as a sort of "exclusive club". Doesn't go out onto the big old web...
I’m hopeful to convince
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