Hubbub Health
Hubbub Health, the "wellness challenge platform" that has been my project at work since last year, is now in its public beta release. I haven't previously mentioned much if anything of my professional existence here but I do now since Hubbub is open to the public; it helps explain why I seem to have fallen into a particularly deep hole during the past six to eight weeks of pre-release push; and, not least, I value the opinions of this blog's elite corps of readers.
Hubbub lets you play in or create a variety of wellness-related challenges -- weight-loss contents, stair-climbing competitions, and the like. The platform's mainly aimed at companies right now, but with plenty of room for employees' friends and family, or for whatever other, unaffiliated player walks in out of the Internet. It exists at an intersection of social media, gamification, and corporate wellness programs that's seeing a lot of activity in the health care industry right now, and should become more and more visible in companies' benefits offerings pretty soon.
I can't take any credit for the product's vision or design, but it does represent a bunch of my own effort. From a personal standpoint it's nothing so awe-inspiring as Pete's tremendous organizational and artistic effort on O, Miami but it's out there and it's what I've been up to. Plus a little bit of my personality has seeped into it via the chatter I've been typing into the site while using it myself (or, to use the delicious office-land cliche, "eating our own dog food"). I've had fun with it within our own development team -- it did spur me to rack up about 230 miles on foot in April for a walking challenge, although my team lost at the last minute due to a single-day, 42-mile effort by another developer far more insane than me in this regard. Please do check it out. (And if you sign up, look for "nateborr" and add me as a friend.)
And with this, being mostly free of coding to deadline as well as just walking a whole hell of a lot in my off hours, I aspire to rejoin the mildly interested living...
3 Comments:
Why would anyone sign up for what looks like complete chaos? Sites like hubbubhealth presume people to be totally unstructured morons, with nothing better to do than play some moronic game of Simon Sez.... Give us a break.
Thanks, belatedly, for your anonymous feedback. Although it's tempting to figure that people should be able to get it together and fix their own habits — I have that thought often enough about my own life — when you look, for example, at U.S. obesity rates it's clear that whatever structure people have brought to their lives hasn't kept them from becoming collectively unhealthier. Under the circumstances, whatever you think of the gaming approach, it's better to try something than to try nothing.
Hi, Nate. Who are a few competitors to Hubbub Health?
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