Walker Tracker Blog

We’re very excited to be announcing new pricing plans for Walker Tracker custom walking programs.

The new pricing should allow a company or organization to have a set cost for their walking program, and not worry about how many new members they have signing up. Take a look at our pricing plans here. As always, these come with a 30-day free trial and take about 3 minutes to get up and running on.

All of our front (logged-out) pages have undergone a redesign (Yay!) featuring a greened-out pair of Keen shoes in the banner, and there’s a nifty new upload-and-crop widget for uploading the top banner on your walking program (in admin -> edit layout), or for your profile pictures (in preferences).

I’m very excited to introduce:

text-message integration!

A new Pro feature at Walker Tracker.

There are plenty of times where you just want to text your steps in and call it good.

Now you can – and you can also check up on your friends, get your stats and add a step blog.

Getting started couldn’t be easier, just send your username:password to

our number: 425-522-2960:

Once you do that – your phone is registered and we’ll remember you next time.

Want to add steps – just text us the number: 9,232

Want to send in a date from the past, send us the number plus a date: 9232 Oct15

Or a blog post?

9232 Oct15 Rained in the morning, but I braved the weather and now I’m on top of Mt. Tabor

Here’s @Athena comparing her stats to @Odysseus

Right now this number works best in the U.S. or Canada. (please check with your network carrier for text-messaging fees — we don’t charge for individual texts, but they might)

Check out our page on Mobile Phone Integration for solutions for walkers outside of N. America.

We did a pretty big update to the Walker Tracker code base last night. So, what’s new?

A lot of what was changed isn’t visible. A ton of small bugs were fixed, code was consolidated and refactored and the groundwork was laid for new, cool stuff down the road.

That said, you should notice a few things, here’s a partial list:

PREFERENCES

– you can now add your real name on the first preferences pane and it will show up in your profile.

POINTS

– Points went out of beta!

– You now receive a fraction of a Giveaway point each time you update. This is somewhat of a big deal, and should result in a far more liquid economy, to use economics-speak.

– You can no longer give your Giveaway points to yourself. This was a hard decision to make, but in the end I think it’ll have a positive difference.

– For administrators, there’s now a Points pane under statistics where you can award Giveaway points or regular points to each user, as well as see who has passed a level recently.

PHOTOS

– All ~32,000 step blog photos were deleted in the process of updating the code during one accidental, anxiety-inducing miscalculation. This was not a planned feature! Fortunately, we keep regular backups around here and all but about 140 were recovered. Those whose photos weren’t recovered have been notified and apologized to. Again, sorry.

– Photos are now stored offsite at a CDN – what this means for you: Quicker photo loading from all geographic locations, better backup in case of a fail.

– Group (team) competitions now show photo backgrounds like individual competitions

COMPETITIONS

– there’s now an example competition called “Challenge Three Greek Myths!”. Simply clicking on that link will set up a one week competition between you, Icarus, Athena and Odysseus. Our community Walker Tracker walkers have been able to challenge those three to a competition for a while – so this is a nice bonus for the custom walking programs and a good way to learn how competitions work.

– You can now run a Group Goal Challenge around Averages.

ADMINISTRATION PANEL

– the aforementioned points panel

– There’s a setting to require walkers to enter their real names.

– There’s a new admin support area that will be going live today. It doesn’t have a lot of content there yet, but this will be a great way for administrators to share information about their programs, seek help, and submit help tickets. You’ll see the link on the home page of your administration panel.

– billing is now automated, as of today

– Ability to reset all data for your program and start from scratch

– new data downloads, with clearer explanations

– Bulk registration template

WALK-THROUGH

Want to see what a Walker Tracker custom program is like before you try out the 30-day free trial? Have a look at our Walk-Through

In many ways, Walker Tracker is already a game.

You play yourself, using statistics and charts to achieve a better average, walk more and game yourself into better physical shape.

You compete with others in Walker Tracker Competitions

However, we wanted to go one better by creating a sense of progression and currency to the system. We wanted to find a way to reward positive behavior, and to allow our walkers to reward each other.

I spent a lot of time looking at other systems that do this. Role playing games, World of Warcraft, slashdot/digg, school, life, economies, etc. In creating the system I tried to create mathematical point calculations that would reward fairness and walking improvement as well as to create a functioning ecosystem with a balance of supply and demand.

In Walker Tracker’s Levels/Points system

• You can earn points
• You can give away points
• With a certain amount of points you gain a level
• A level is mostly a symbol of progress and status
  • That said, gaining levels does open up new features on Walker Tracker, and you do receive more ‘Giveaway points’ each time you ‘level up’. More is planned for tying features and secret parts of Walker Tracker to the level system.

The most important metric we can track is Diligence. One of the largest goals of Walker Tracker is to permanently change one’s lifestyle behavior. To build physical activity into a routine. Walking every day, logging your steps, measuring your change is one of the best things we can help you accomplish. That which is measured, improves. For that reason, levels and points are weighted heavily toward diligence and meeting your own goals. It’s not a measure of how many steps you’ve walked, but whether you’re achieving what you set out to do by joining a walking program.

So far, I think it’s going fantastically well. I feel an excitement at each time I progress up a level or receive points from someone else.

Let us know what you think!

If you want to become a level one walker right now, all it takes is your first step entry!

Sign up to get started

It’s my pleasure to introduce Robin Jennings:

Robin will be joining Walker Tracker to help energize this blog, among many other things. Robin is a writer, traveler and parent, and it’s going to be great having her help. She’s been a long-time walker, but she’s new to pedometers – so drop on by and give her a warm welcome. In the meantime, watch this space for some new posts on walking and walking communities. If you have a particular interest related to walking you’d like to see talked about here – let Robin know!

@Robin on Walker Tracker

I guess this is why weekdays feel like weak days (harr harr). My chart over the last 30 days is even more pronounced. I’m definitely in a winter lull, but Mondays seem especially hard. Knowing this – I’m going to work some schedule changes into Monday.

Charts by day-of-the-week now in your Graphs area!

Also, Walker Tracker has a small CafePress store now too, if you feel like showing your WT colors.

Here are a couple of new features:

There are now group widgets, so if you have your own website or blog you can post a widget of your group’s progress. Go to your group and click on the ‘Widget’ link in the sub navigation. Note: Your group administrators will have to enable the widget for it to work.

Post your steps to Facebook

Facebook Connect is now implemented (at least barebones – likely more to come, here). If you post your steps, you’ll see a button that will allow you to post your daily step count/blog post/picture to your Facebook feed if you have a facebook account. Turn this off here if you wish.

Also: Happy Inauguration and New Year. Here’s to another great year of walking.

Ben

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