Social Workout

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Simple Goal Setting Comes to SW 2.0

Last night, or maybe it was this morning, I wrote the following "special alert" to users of "SW 2.0." That's what we call our fancy, new personal tracking, goal setting, and challenge-doing site. We've been working away on the changes for a while, and we've got a lot more to come. I'll write more here, and on the new site, about what it all means, and where we're all going; but right now I'm off to give Holidayasana postcards to the 14 YOGA STUDIOS who are doing a challenge on Social Workout in December. Be there or be square! 

Fasten your seat belts, today we're releasing a bunch of big upgrades to SocialWorkout.com. We'll post the nitty gritty on our blog, but we wanted to get a summary out to everyone's homepage too. Say hello to the "shared goal!”

Huh? OK, say you want to "get exercise 20 times in a month." Previously on SW, you had to create a full-fledged challenge to set that goal. This meant we had lots of lonely, one person-one goal challenges floating around. Now, you can start any goal at any time with a single click. Right there at the top of your homepage, you'll be able to track your progress for that goal, as well as any progress by any friends who are working on the same goal. If you want, you can also visit the “goal page” to check out everyone else who is working on that goal, no matter when they started.

Not to worry, we haven't gotten rid of the good, old challenge. We’ve actually taken to calling them “social challenges" as they make sense for groups of friends, or for small companies, or for gyms, yoga studios, churches, or rockstar group fitness teachers with big Facebook followings. A social challenge has a specific start date and end date, a particular group of people, and it comes complete with leaderboards for the individuals and teams involved. Naturally, we’ll continue to produce our public SW challenges, like, say, the Holidayasana challenge which starts December 1st!

OK, here's the big shocker: We've eliminated the ability to track an activity without setting a goal.This was a tough call, but we felt “tracking for your records” was confusing things without adding enough value. SO, if you want to track an activity, you simply need to set a goal. Give us a little time, and we'll be able to recommend goals to you. It’s going to be cool. As always, we remain wide open to you suggesting activities and related goals. Soon enough, we will open up the whole system so you can add these directly.

Note: If you were tracking activities outside of a challenge, you won’t see your list of activities at the top of this page any more, but all of your records are totally intact and accessible. Simply click through to your activity log page at any time, and you can review the logs for any activity for which you’ve ever posted an update. OK, that’s it for now. Thanks so much for hanging with us! This is still very much the beginning, and we’re determined to make SW better and better. The goal? Building a site that helps us help each other to get off our butts and achieve our wildest dreams!

Very best! Oliver and the SW Crew