Walker Tracker Blog

We keep track of metrics around here - it’s part of what we do - and we hit a couple of nice ones recently.

October 3rd marked crossing 3 billion collective steps. Now, that’s a long way from the 700 billion needed for the bailout - but were steps = dollars, we’d all be doing rather nicely! And indeed, I would claim that we’re all a bit better off for it.

Also in the last week we posted a record number of steps per day - 10,000,000. Ten million steps in a single day! Go Walker Tracker walkers! The walker who crossed the three billion step mark got a Walker Tracker Pro membership.

Of course - the best solution for running a wellness program with your organization is to get a Walker Tracker Private Level.

However, it’s certainly possible to run a successful walking program for your organization using the Walker Tracker community site. 

Here are a few tips if you wish to do so:

• Register yourself first
• On the lower right hand column there’s a box that says ‘invite a friend to Walker Tracker‘
• Go there and copy the ‘invite link’. Use that link to invite everyone in your organization. That way you’ll be able to see who signs up and when via the ‘View your invitees‘ page 

This will allow you to corral and track signups that are part of your organization.

Once everyone is signed up, remember that:

• You can create private groups (you’ll need to invite all those users to this group)
• You can create private competitions. Note that you can create a competition as private - play around with it to get it just as you want it - and then make it public.

If later you decide you need the extra privacy, administrative controls, branding and statistics that a private level affords, no worries! We can help migrate your users to your own program.

We added a few new features this weekend:

Competitions administration - for fine-tuning your walking competitions.

Group autolinking - add a pound sign in front of your group sign, ie #portlanders - similar to how you refer to usernames via the @username syntax. These two bits were borrowed from Twitter - great stuff.

Details in the forum

Also, we’ve added a new type of competition - Goal Challenge on Step averages. 

There are essentially two main types of competitions:

Goal challenges challenge everyone to strive for a certain goal - such as walking 100,000 steps in a week, or keeping an average above 8,000 for the month. Everyone who meets this goal ‘wins’.

Normal competitions have only one winner, whether it’s a group or an individual.

Details are here

Cheers,

Ben

We’re building a robust administration area for our private level administrators. I thought I’d share a few screenshots. The administrative interface has a fairly bare-bones look to it currently, but I’m excited about how far it’s come along and how powerful it is already.

As always, if you or your organization is interested in a private level - let’s talk!

(click on any picture to enlarge it)

Walker stevemac entered in the 2 Billionth Step yesterday (el Cinco de Mayo!) on Walker Tracker.

As a thank you, stevemac received a Lifetime Pro membership to Walker Tracker. When I congratulated him, he said:

“I’m part of a Project Team that is participating in a step challenge.  Our group is called CNRL EIT and we have multiple teams and monthly prizes at our team meetings.  We started as a group in February.

It’s been a fantastic health initiative for our team and a lot of competitive fun.  I’ve never seen everyone here walk so much.  Seems most of us are doing “walking” meetings now.”

Congrats on all that walking, everyone!

Walker Tracker has teamed up with getDowntown, a program of the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, to create a private walking community on Walker Tracker for Ann Arbor, Michigan residents. The private level will be used to celebrate and promote Curb Your Car Month! We’re overjoyed to be part of such a great program. 

Considering that Prevention Magazine just voted Ann Arbor the 3rd most walkable city in the US this certainly seems like a perfect fit.  

The Ann Arbor development community is giving away 30 free pedometers, first come first serve, so stop by the getDowntown Blog to learn more about the Ann Arbor/ Walker Tracker contest.

note: If you’re an Ann Arbor resident and you’re already on Walker Tracker drop us a line for your options.

Interested in private levels for your organization or community? Let us know.

I whipped up a quick example of using the Walker Tracker API together with the Google Charts API to draw a nifty looking chart.

The Google Charts API, while a teensy bit limited, is very cool. You can probably expect to see a little more of it here.

(not saying my step counts are awesome… unfortunately)

Have a look at the Walker Tracker API Example

Help your friends and family get a jump-start on resolutions this year by equipping them with a Walker Tracker Pro subscription and a whiz-bang pedometer.  Give Walker Tracker Pro as a Gift.You have three delivery methods:

1. Print out our fancy PDF card, follow the folding instructions, sign, deliver!
2. Instruct us to send the gift email at a precise hour and day
3. Commit the activation code to memory. Whisper it in their ear. 

All Summer and into the Fall I’ve been working at adding a number of new features to Walker Tracker. I’m very happy to announce that I’ve now released these into the wild.

There are many, many additions and changes to this release. I’ve listed all of the changes here.

Competitions

The headliner is Competitions. You can now lay down the step gauntlet against any other walker on the site, and even challenge those who have yet to join. Think you walk like a hero? Then challenge one! Odysseus, Athena and Icarus have all been recruited to provide walkers with mythological competition. I’ve included a couple of screenshots from the competition section below. I think this should be very fun.

Walker Tracker Pro

The second major change is there’s now a Walker Tracker Pro upgrade (you’ll need to be logged in). Upgrading to Walker Tracker Pro will unlock a few extra features and help support development (thanks!).

The features we’re starting off with are:

• See your daily rank
• Chart your aerobic steps
• Receive priority email support
• Never see ads

I’ve got many more pro features up my sleeve that I’m excited to implement over the coming months. Also, a huge thanks to those who have already upgraded. Oh, how much is it? You choose! I lifted the idea for variable pricing off of the awesome LibraryThing.

Let me know how you like the new stuff.

Thanks,

Ben

Create a competition:

The API for Walker Tracker has been baked. Have a look at the API documentation, or head on over to the Walker Tracker API Google Group. (What’s an API?)

Right now the API is read only — which means you won’t be able to add new step counts to it, etc. That will come next when we work through authentication. However, in the meantimequite a lot of data is available.

Enjoy. Let us know if you use it somewhere, we’d love to take a look.

Walker Tracker has grown since I started it on a lark a year and a half ago as a little project with which to goad my family members and friends into walking more. My friend David and I were the only ones on the site for a while. There are over two thousand members from all over the planet now, all who found their way here with very little guidance from me. Excepting a few adwords here and there, I’ve done very little to promote the site, but during this growth of my pet project, I’ve become steadily aware that there just might be something else to this.

For this reason I’ve asked two long term Walker Tracker members, bkerr (avg: 7,290) and edwardvielmetti (avg: 9,717) to join me in helping expand Walker Tracker in a meaningful way. They belong to the Ann Arbor, Michigan contingent (you’ll notice there are quite a few Ann Arborites on the site), and I’m very excited to have them help move the site forward. You can read more about them on their blogs (Ed / Brian)

Two weekends ago I flew back to Michigan and spent an intensive weekend with them. I drank coffee in half a dozen cafes, experienced rain that no one in a hollywood effects studio would ever simulate for fear of it seeming excessive and unrealistic, and was made a plastic pancake by Ed’s two year old. I left feeling very excited about the direction here. We have a lot of great plans for Walker Tracker, as a community and as a potential business.

So here’s a great thank you to those of you who have stuck around. There’s a few more of us here now making sure that the lights stay on and tinkering away on the secret projects in the basement.

Oh, and hey, we have a blog!