Wellsphere: Creating Communities Of Healthy People
30
January
Wellsphere is a community site for wellness that is being launched today with the goal of “Bringing together people, places and things that help you live a healthier, happier life”. A wellsphere is essentially a page where users list their goals and can then find like-minded people who are also working toward achieving similar goals. Users can also comment and give advice on the goals of other people and by doing so create a community of goal-oriented people.
This is very similar to the popular site 43 Things (the original site for goal-oriented-people), the main difference being that Wellsphere is primarily health and fitness oriented whereas 43 Things is more general in nature (want to see a ghost? so do about 300 people!)
To begin using the site, you first create a profile for yourself and then you can either create your own wellsphere (as many as you want) or subscribe to those of others if you find them similar to your individual goals. I went ahead and created a profile for myself to test the site.
As you can see from the screenshot below, after you have given them the basic information about yourself, you have to choose your goals from a select list, which while pretty comprehensive, may or may not have the specific goal you have in mind. The major goals include Eat Healthy, Lose Weight, Reduce Stress, Get Fit, Get Active, Play Sports and Complete an Endurance Event. These, of course, have sub-sections so you can be more specific (like which sport or which endurance event).
Once I had my goals in place, I showed up on the wellspheres page where I could search by Help givers or seekers. That’s me (Fitness M) below!)
The best feature of Wellspheres (and probably it’s Unique Selling Point over 43 Things) is the ability to search for, and connect with, an Activity Partner.
As you can see, you can search for partners on the basis of fields like activity type, skill level, gender, and most importantly area-proximity and then send a message to them to see if they can work with you toward achieving your (typically) common goal. This is an extremely useful feature to have since more and more studies show that people excel at fitness regimens when there is a support group involved. There is also a Local Resources section that lists resources like chiropractors, health clubs, personal trainers and yoga studios in your local area, but currently it only lists San Francisco based centers.
Finally, I wanted to make sure I mention that unlike many of the newer sites which expect you to login and then “figure things out as you go along”, Wellsphere has a comprehensive Help and FAQ section that answers most questions a first-time visitor would have making it that much more likely that the user will stay, contribute and enrich the community rather than shake his head and leave.
Go ahead and check Wellsphere out - there’s probably a health-conscious community right in your area that’s waiting just for you!
- Via TechCrunch
Technorati Tags: health, fitness, wellsphere
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