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The Facebook of Fitness - New Intergration Added
RunKeeper, is an online community for fitness enthusiasts to measure, track and improve their fitness through smartphone technology. The community has been growing at an extraordinary rate and is now 6 million strong. RunKeeper has more than doubled its user base since November.
RunKeeper have integrated with various different gadgets and accessories, there is a WiFi body scale tracker, sleep monitoring devices, and heart rate transmitters. This is aimed at giving people one resource for the various health and fitness services and means information can be sent out to friends, family, and competitors over various social channels such as facebook and twitter.
The app was originally selling for $10 on the app store, and selling quite well, Jacobs and team have declared that the RunKeeper app will be free permanently.
Whilst the community has been growing, the startup has been building a “correlation engine”, because only aggregating fitness and health data from a few devices wasn’t enough. There needs to be a way to make sense of all the data integration from third parties. And so, the “Health Graph” was born to do just that. RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs wants you to “imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more”, that has the sole purpose of delivering an “ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user’s own historical health and fitness data”.
It is no good having a health graph without an open API and so two weeks ago, RunKeeper announced that it was opening up its health graph to third party developers. The outside parties can tap into users’ FitnessFeeds, to build clients and apps.
FourSquare, Zeo, Withings, Polar, Wahoo, and BodyMedia were among the partners looking to take advantage of the new, open, RunKeeper health graph, this week RunKeeper has announced three additional partners: Swimsense, an advanced monitor that allows swimmers to track performance information, distance data, etc., Earndit, which lets users earn points and collect trophies during workouts that can be redeemed for rewards, and Runstar, an Android app that enables users to track their running progress and share results with friends.
It may seem counterintuitive for RunKeeper to partner with sites like Runstar, which offers a competitive service, however Jacobs said that he is more interested in the ultimate goal of building a robust and open framework for the fitness community, this comes before nominal competition.
The service that RunKeeper offers seems ambitious but extremely useful with the open Health Graph and API, the free app, fitness feeds, the ability to compare metrics in FitnessReports, share achievements with friends and the fact that each time someone uses the integrated device or app, the corresponding data posts both on the third party’s site and RunKeeper’s feeds.
The future of RunKeeper looks very bright especially with Google Health recently stopping its services, making less competition for RunKeeper to worry about when working on their quest to aggregate the world’s health and fitness information. In the coming months there will be a lot of opportunities for developers to show their talents when building the associated clients and apps.
June 2011
