Official Lifefitter Blog

Free Beta Gift Promotion Update

2009-05-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

Where is my beta gift? We have addressed this question many times in various formats and venues but we wanted to have a short blog post to refer to as needed.

For those members who originally requested a beta invite for a Lifefitter social network the beta promotion is still being honored.

As you probably remember, the offer was, “become an active beta tester, use the various features in our site, offer feedback and report bugs and get some sort of beta gift”. Although our product plans have changed over the past several months that’s still the plan.

About half of the beta invites been sent and hopefully the rest will be delivered in the next 30-45 days. We expect the actual beta development phase to last into next year but we will draw a line as it makes sense feature wise in mid to late summer, issue the gifts to those who qualify and close out the promotion.

Please note, there are some channels where we had no real traction (bowling, music and skateboarding for example) and for those user’s you will be invited to change into a different channel if you choose.

So, that’s where things are currently. We ask everyone to please read the previous blog posts linked below for more information.

Business Model Changes and How it Effect the Beta Promotion

Beta Promotion Gift Checklist

If you have additional questions related to the beta gift promotions please use the discussion board for this blog post to ask them. This will allow us to keep the information in one place and other participants who have similar questions and concerns can refer back to it later.
We will also expand this post from time to time as common questions come up to help centralize the information.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1) Why are you “forcing” me to change my start page to participate in the beta?
You are free to use the site as much (or as little) as you wish. Yes, we “require” the page to be used if you are trying to participate in the beta gift promotion but if you have set it as your start page and you’re not happy with it (and therefore you don’t otherwise use it) please change it back to something else. Simply changing your homepage will not result in any free gift whatsoever and we don’t want anyone to think that’s the case. We hope you will still drop in from time to time and see what’s up, and as the features improve maybe you will reconsider in the future. We want you to be happy and we certainly don’t want to "force" you into anything.

2) Was the whole beta promotion a ploy just to get Facebook fans?
No. It was a marketing plan to target people with specific interests to use our social network. We didn’t plan for the first iteration to fail and we expected to have closed the books on this a long time ago. There have been some delays but we continue to press forward. If we wanted to scam you out of your email address we would have already sold it off and moved on. We’re trying to build a good product and honor all past commitments.

For what it’s worth, we never tied being a “Facebook fan” to the beta gift promotion. We actually ran a few low dollar contests for the fans and that, combined with general viral promotion on Facebook, led to the fan growth. However, we often asked our fans to request beta invites so we certainly understand how people perceive the two as being connected.

3) How could you have ever afforded this promotion in the first place?
We knew all along that only a very small percentage of users would actively engage with a start-up social network, use all of the features, report bugs and offer genuine feedback and therfore the cost of the program was estimated to be managable. We have set aside a portion of our budget for these gift items and we still have it set aside. Will everyone get a gift? No, but we hope those that don't qualify will learn enough about the site to remain a user and maybe you'll come away with something much more valuable, a few new friends.

4) I have done everything to qualify. Where is my free gift?
Since we are actively in the beta period now it is impossible for anyone to have "done everything". For people asking this question please read this entire post along with the other blog entries linked above for clarification. If you still have a question, please post it in the comment section on this post.

5) What would you like me to do as a beta gift promotion participant?
Honestly? Forget about the gift and don't let it have any bearing on your use of the site at all. We're not asking that so we don't have to send you anything, we're asking because that is the absolute best way for us to have active users helping to fine tune the site. When people offer feedback just so they can "check the box" towards their free gift it's usually pretty obvious and honestly, not all that helpful. We just want to make a great product that ultimately helps you create new friendships. Anything you can do to help us reach that goal is much appreciated, and it just might end for you with a cool gift.

We will add more questions as the come up. That's all for now.

Post by: JT

Friendship One: Charlie Harrison & Scott Dillon

2009-05-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

Recently a few resourceful Startlikers used the comment board to connect and plan a mountain biking trip. To our knowledge this is the first connection enabled by Startlike and from what we understand “Friendship One” is off to a great start.

Startlikers Charlie Harrison and Scott Dillon live fairly close to each other and through a series of discussions they realized each was proficient in different outdoor pursuits. Charlie was an experienced hiker/backpacker while Scott was an avid mountain biker. They decided it would be a good idea to meet and share their knowledge and experience with one another.

So, on April 25, 2009 Charlie and Scott met to ride mountain bikes and Friendship One began.

Without sounding too corny, this is a BIG deal for us. Our corporate mission is to create friendships and although our strategy has gone through numerous iterations over the past year this mission has never changed.

We are honestly humbled to know that a connection was made that would not have existed were it not for our product and we hope this will be the first of many.

Most companies hang their “first dollar” on the wall. For us, we’ll be hanging this photo in honor of our first friendship created because there will never be another “Friendship One”.

Now, Charlie and Scott, please don't get in a fight!!

Post by: Jeff

Can I get a beta promo checklist to be sure I get some free stuff?

2009-04-01T18:09:00.000-07:00

Since we started sending out beta invitations we have received a few inquiries from folks wanting to get a “checklist” of the exact steps they must take in order to get a t-shirt or other item in association with our beta gift promotion.

The “condition” to get the free gift is (and always has been) to be an active beta tester. Being active means simply trying out all of the features we release, offering useful feedback and reporting any bugs you experience. We have always wanted (and needed) to find REAL users with a REAL desire to see the project be successful.

Now, this is not going to be a popular post with some people but we’re not going to provide any sort of “beta checklist”. We have asked several times that people only looking for a free gift with no real passion for the project to please move on because they would likely not qualify anyway and just end up unsatisfied. We’ve always known that only a dedicated few would really jump into the fray with us and actively participate in all stages of the beta.

Our advice to all beta promotion participants is to simply jump in if you like what we’re doing. If not, please just don’t use it and maybe the others participating in the process will help shape a product you’ll want to use in the future. If you become a truly active user of the product the beta period should end with a nice little reward for you.

Here are a few answers to some other beta promotion related questions:

How do you know if I am active?
Your beta invite included a link that was encoded to track your use of the site. We will define active members based on their usage of the product features by using this tracking code.

What if I do everything but a technical glitch causes my tracking not to report?
We’ll do our best to avoid this but we can’t claim to be perfect. If there are disputes at the end of the beta we’ll do our best to resolve them fairly but our judgment will have to be final.

I don’t like it! Isn’t this whole thing kinda arbitrary?
We don’t mean to sound arrogant with this comment at all, but if you don’t like it, please just don’t try to participate. We have not taken a penny from you and we will not spam you, infect your computer with a virus, steal your facebook login, sell your name or do anything else to harm you. Seriously, if we had to give a gift to every person that blows into our site and posts a comment that 100 other people have already posted we’d be out of business in less than 24 hours. We look forward to sending beta gifts to people who give us some honest time and feedback but if you’re only here for the gift, you’re the last person we want to send one to because you are not helping reach our common goal at all.

I’ve been waiting on a t-shirt for 6 months. It’s a scam! You suck!
That’s not really a question but we’ve heard it more than a few times. If we were a scam, we would have long ago sold our database of sign-ups to some spammers for a pretty penny and started something new. We can assure you that nothing here is a scam. That said, we made several product development missteps along the way and, as previously documented, we had to re-tool things very late in the process. We hate it and we agree that we have sucked badly up to this point. Our new direction is showing promise and we hope it works. All we can do now is try to suck less in the future.

We hope you find this information useful. We figure a certain amount of flaming will follow but, to be totally honest, if you can’t appreciate the candor and inherent truths in this post, we were really just never meant for each other :-/

Post by: JT

If at first you fail…iterate.

2009-02-20T06:35:00.000-08:00

We’ve been getting some questions on the status of the platform release and we haven’t had many answers for the past few weeks. We are happy to finally have a meaningful update.

We hit a strategic roadblock when we began to decide which brands and locations had the most interest and should be released first.

As you know, the goal of Lifefitter is to bring people together for real offline connections to enjoy a shared passion such as hiking, cycling, diving, etc. In order to accomplish this objective we need to have enough people on the platform to enable these connections. As you may remember, that’s the reason we were working so hard to put together a large beta invite list prior to launching any features.

So, what was the strategic roadblock you ask? Well, we had pretty good response to the beta push on some of our channels. The problem was, when we looked at the database of potential invitees to determine what geographic areas to launch first, we realized that our marketing campaign had not penetrated well enough in many specific locations.

So, our options came down to the following 3 choices:

1) Release the platform in our best-penetrated areas and rely on the early adopters to bring in other members (ie viral marketing) before becoming frustrated with the lack of connections and moving on.

2) Spend more money in specific markets and try to create large enough geographic concentrations to power the platform in select areas.

3) Revise our features to provide something more useful to early adopters that was not reliant on the network effect to provide user value.

After deciding that option A was very likely to fail and option B didn’t make much sense in the current economic environment, we decided on option C.

So, how do we hope to provide something useful to early adopters? I’d like to introduce you to Startlike. It's a browser homepage that has all of the basic features you need like Google search, custom news feeds and quick links to your favorite sites but it also has a few things much more relevant to your interests.

With Startlike you get an awesome photograph and a few links about your passion every day. You can join the discussion with others who share your interests and begin to create new friendships right away.

The response to Startlike has been great and people seem to love it. Our early adopters have shown no signs of becoming disinterested because the core features do not require a large user-base to be useful (ie they don’t rely on that pesky network effect like a social network).

Our immediate plan is to build on Startlike’s early success and increase its core functionality. Then, as it grows, we hope Startlike will realize its stated purpose and funnel users into the broader Lifefitter Social Platform to support our corporate mission of creating friendships.

There are literally tens of thousands of social networks on the web. Quick, name 5!! The reason most people can’t is because so few succeed. Early adopters leave before the network achieves scale and this results in a death spiral. We have always known overcoming this hurdle would be our biggest challenge and we are excited about the journey ahead with Startlike leading the way.

You may have a few questions, such as;

What about the Lifefitter beta I signed up for?
It’s still coming, albeit in slightly different form that we initially planned. For those of you who signed up for the beta to get a free gift of some sort by participating we fully plan to honor that promotion.

The deal was, you use all the features throughout the beta while giving feedback and we’ll send you the gift when the beta is complete. We’ve known all along that only a super dedicated few would achieve this goal and that’s still the plan. We hope you are excited to have Startlike and it’s functions as the first set of feature releases.

Everyone who signed up for the beta will be invited to get started and enjoy a Startlike channel. From there, we will release the social features along the way as the user base scales and hopefully, when it’s all said and done, you’ll have a few new friends.

What happened to my data where I signed up for a beta invite?
Nothing. As clearly stated in our privacy policy your personal information will not be shared or sold. Invites will still be sent to the email address you provided. The only difference is that the process now begins with Startlike.

What if I don’t like this “new direction” and want out?
First, we really hate to lose you. If you are passionate about a channel we hope you will choose to stay onboard and work with us to build a great network. That said, if you don’t want to participate, simply unsubscribe from the member list when your beta invite arrives.

Well, that’s where we are. Startlike is online with a few channels and you are free to take it for a spin. Once we stomp out some bugs we’ll release more channels and move into a broader open beta. From there, we’ll see how it goes.

Post by: Jeff

Mountain Biking 101 - Assume the Attack Position.

2009-02-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday was a bit of an adventure to say the least. After a bit of arm twisting we convinced Jim, our CTO to get a new mountain bike, so the following morning we all met at a local trail for some MTB fun. Strapped and ready we brave the 40 degree weather and take off down the sandy paths of Sesqui's bike trail. For the first mile or so everyone cracks jokes about who's going to monkey first or be the first to endo. All of the jokes were funny for the first few miles, but 3 miles into the trail Jim finally confessed that he had just eaten french toast from Sonic and wasn't feeling well (nobody told him not to eat nasty, greasy junk food before biking). I asked Jim why he wanted Sonic, "I was hungry and it was the most appetising thing Sonic had and I didn't feel like going anywhere else." Fair enough, but next time get a powerbar. Jim's weak gag reflex and lack of stomach control is definitely a lesson learned.
French toast free and 10 minutes later we're all back on the trail and flying through sandy single track and pine tree forest. Towards the end of the trail there is a downhill section of steep root-filled twisting single track, nothing too difficult. At the bottom of the his is a small 3 foot drop formed from a web of tree roots which takes you to a fork in the trail. So here's the deal, I've ridden this trail and I knew it was coming up and I decided I didn't want to jump it because riding too fast will land you into a tree immediately after the drop. Instead of assuming the attack position, I do these 3 things in order:

Hesitate
Lock my brakes
Whisper "Oh Sh*t"

Karma can hit you at funny times, espeically when you joke and imagine someone else endo-ing before you. I went over the bars and a tree root jumped out and smacked me in the nose; I was a human torpedo for at least 3 seconds. The end result is a lot of blood, a broken nose and a slight feeling of embarassment:

My lesson: When approaching rough terrain, assume the attack position.
.
Post by: Bobby

Want An Exciting New Homepage?

2009-01-27T14:48:00.001-08:00

It's Tuesday afternoon and we're happy to announce a brand new homepage utility from Startlike, sister company of Lifefitter. Startlike is a custom web browser start/home page that covers the outdoor activities you're passionate about. It's an extremely simple and efficient start page with basic features like, Google web search and quick links to your favorite sites. It also has cool little hotlink tags around each image that link to cool facts, maps and videos. We're really excited about these new pages, and hope everyone else will be just as enthused.

Right now Startlike is testing 3 channels (SCUBA, Skiing, Camping / Hiking) and Lifefitter is powering them all through their active lifestyle brands. Eventually every passion will have a homepage they can enjoy every day. For now all of our SCUBA, Skiing and Camping lovers can get a new Startlike page:

SCUBA Startlike
Skiing Startlike
Camping and Hiking Startlike

Let us know what you think about Startlike!

Update And A Surprise For All.

2009-01-23T21:52:00.000-08:00

Thanks to some avid fans at Outpacker (Scott Bland in particular), I realized that there hasn't been a blog post since mid-December. Sorry about that, things in the office got hectic and crazy, but we're all still here squashing platform bugs, drinking Red Bull and eating lots of Mexican food from down the street.

Just so everyone knows what's going on: We're in the last stage of our 'in-house beta' and have a few more wrinkles to iron out before we open the flood gates.

I can give you a small peek at part of the "Places" page. On this page you'll be able to discuss trails / parks / resorts...you name it. Been somewhere amazing? Well, you can tell the world about it, share pictures, and create connections all on a single page. You might not gather a whole lot from this image but there are 3 ways to create a new place, point and click, physical address and GPS coordinates. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to add your favorite outdoor locations anywhere in the world:

This is just one piece of the puzzle, I'll show a little more later next week.

I kinda have a big surprise for everyone on Monday. It's a new utility from the Lifefitter sister company StartLike. You'll be able to dive in and Start using it Tuesday, January 27th. The utility ties in extremely well with our active lifestyles and we hope you'll love it as much as we all do. It's very slick, very useful and just plain fun! Check back Monday afternoon for the full scoop on StartLike. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Post by: Bobby

Ch-Ch-Check It Out - Photo Feature

2008-12-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

I realize there is nothing new or unique about posting pictures to a website. MySpace does it, Facebook does it and so do a thousand other websites. Uploading photos may be old news, but I'm showing you this because it's the first and most important step to using our cornerstone feature: Places. What's that? You want to see the Places video? I'll have to save that for another post, so for now..check out the video below:

Post by: Bobby

Digg Dugg

2008-12-18T17:32:00.000-08:00

So we added the ability to Digg our posts. If you're feeling up to it..we'd appreciate the diggs and getting dugg and all that fun stuff. Can you Digg it?

Check back tomorrow for some cool videos of platform features.

Post by: Bobby

Email Errors - We're On It.

2008-12-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

We realize some of you may have received multiple beta invite confirmations and we're working on correcting the problem. We can't exactly crawl into your inboxes and remove excessive emails, but in a nut shell here is what happened: Our email provider didn't give an affirmative response when we batched up your email. The lack of response caused our provider to continually attempt to send your confirmation email until it got the response it needed. Unfortunately, the lack of response from the provider convinced them you were not going to get the email, resulting in multiple messages. Again, we apologize for this and we're doing everything in our power to correct the issue. Thanks for understanding.

Update 5:30pm (est): We've fixed the problem and everything is back to normal. Hooray.

Post by: Bobby

Grab The Mic And The Ma Bell Will CONNECT You...

2008-11-13T15:13:00.001-08:00

Ok, so it's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you without a dope beat to step to... but there is good reason for the time gap - we're ironing out the seams and preparing to ROLL OUT (Ludacris not Transformers) the beta.

Our dev team has been working non-stop for the last month - No showers, no video games, and a lot of tacos. The floor is covered with 4th meal, it smells like feet and everyone is ready to launch. That being said...the beta invites are coming, just be patient and I promise it will be well worth the wait.

I thought I'd talk about one of the really cool tools we've managed to implement into our platform and one of the reasons we haven't launched our sites just yet. It's a little thing called Facebook Connect and it has the ability to seamlessly move you between Facebook and our Lifefitter sites with out a lot of hassle. In a nutshell, one click on Facebook Connect will allow you to interact with all of your Facebook friends from any of our 20 sites.

Facebook does a great job of keeping you connected with your family and friends, and we don't want you to ever have to worry about building a friends list from scratch, which is why Facebook Connect is such an awesome tool. It works hand in hand with all of our sites to provide you with a seamless social networking experience. Taking your friends with you is just as important as knowing what happens between sites.

Here's a quick example: On Outpacker, your friends set up a connection to go hiking next weekend, but sometimes you forget to log in to Outpacker because you're always on Facebook. Facebook Connect will relay the news, post it to your News Feed and BAM, now you know about the news from Outpacker without leaving Facebook. You'll always feel connected without the hassle of logging into multiple sites.

So there you have it, another cool feature: Facebook Connect

If anyone wants to follow us on twitter just go to: http://www.twitter.com/lifefitter

We usually post cool stuff about our beta fish Marcus, stuff we're working on, and random bathroom breaks.

Post by: Bobby

That was Fatboooonned!!

2008-10-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Even with all of the backlash we've received for our skateboarding network, these guys decided to film a little Fatboneage.

Take :30 sec to watch:

Platform Progress Update

2008-10-07T08:08:00.001-07:00

I thought I would take a few moments to go over some of the features we are working on for the platform and answer one of the more burning questions that we have encountered in the forums since this whole process began.

If you’ve been keeping up with us, you know that our goal is to help our users create strong, new friendships. One of the ways in which we hope to do that is by encouraging members to join each other on dives, bike rides, hikes, or whatever else your passion involves. I mean, who couldn’t use another fishing buddy right? To that end, we’ve created an application we call “Connections” to make it all happen. Here is a screenshot of a Connection on TrailGrind.

*Please note - we are using TrailGrind (mountain biking) as the example. If you are waiting on a different brand in our Active Lifestyle Channel everything will be customized for your affinity.*

As you can see from the other links on this page the platform has all of the basic social network tools along with the info needed to connect a group on an upcoming trail ride including the place, date, time, and a description. It also includes handy tools like a “Comments” section and a “People Connecting” area for getting to know who you might be riding with, should you decide to join.

So looks simple right? Why are we seeking beta testers so aggressively instead of just rolling it out and building as we go? Before I answer that let me take a moment and try to explain just how important Connections are to the platform and how it separates us from other sites you know.

The biggest difference between the Lifefitter platform and a generic social network is our goal to help you make NEW friends versus just keeping in touch with existing friends. To accomplish this goal the Connections application must facilitiate this process but before that can happen, it takes PEOPLE using the platform.

We have modeled the Connections application similar to match making utilities on dating websites but instead of helping you find a suitable dinner companion, we want to help you meet other mountain bikers (or SCUBA Divers, or Cyclists, or whatever your passion is).

Web history has taught us that when dating websites fail to attract a large and active membership base very quickly they fail 99.9% of the time. So to go back to the original question of: "Why are we seeking beta testers so aggressively"? Simply stated, just like a dating website we need enough members on each affinity/brand to create connections for you from day 1. If we don't have a good base of beta members there won't be any connections and you won't find much utility in the site. So, we decided to launch the beta invite process early and aggressively solicit invite requests.

Some of you who requested your invite early in the process are already getting anxious. We get a lot of "what the hell is going on?" emails. This is the first time we have shared exactly what we are up to with our Connections application and we hope you can appreciate the need for an extended beta marketing push and we ask that you please be patient. We have setup Pages on facebook for every brand and we invite you to use these pages and connect with other prospective beta members as we all await the platform.

We are doing our best to promote the upcoming release and get as many people signed up as possible and we would love for you to help. Some of you are participating in the viral MSA promotion which is really helping to spread the word and help us get that much needed large membership base. We appreciate that. For those that were not interested in MSA, we would still really appreciate it if you tell your friends by emailing or posting a link to the site...every little bit helps.

We will continue the pre-marketing push aggressively until there are enough people sitting on go to make a run at this thing. We hope you will remain excited about the platform and be ready to jump in and use it on day 1.

Here are a few more screenshots of the Connection application tools so you can view, create, search, and manage all of your connections.

So, thoughts? Comments? Dislikes? Let’s hear it. After all, we are here to provide you with an exciting, useful tool that will encourage you to grow your friendship tree tall and wide. Thanks for dropping by and checking out what we’ve been up to. Anyone in Columbia want to play a couple of sets at Hampton Circle tomorrow? :)

Post by: Josh

T-Shirts, T-Shirts, T-Shirts

2008-10-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves a new t-shirt right? We love 'em even more if they are free.

We are now up to 18 brands taking beta invite requests and we need a large enough test group to populate the database and test some of our more advanced features that rely heavily on the network effect. So, we have aggregated all of our brands onto 1 page and you can request invites for any that match your interests.

http://www.lifefitter.com/tshirts/?s=6

We do ask that you only request invites for sites that match your interests because to actually get the shirt you will be required to use the site features, post some good content, make a few friends and report any bugs. It's really easy if you have a passion for the network but it would be a pain if you're just trying to score some free threads. So please be considerate and save beta invites for people who really want them.

In the next week or so we hope to post our first "Development Update" here on the blog and show the world what we have been working on. We think the features are really coming together well and we are excited to show everyone what we've been cooking. In the meantime, head over to the link above and get on the invite list for any brands you're interested in.

Post by: Jeff

Staying Happy and Productive in a Fast-Paced Environment

2008-09-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

When you invest as much of your time into work as we have invested here at Lifefitter, it’s important to make the most out of your free time and your hobbies. Take me for instance. While I “draw pictures all day” here at work, I am also a trained percussionist, a late-blooming 3.0 tennis player, and a die-hard college football fanatic. These things are great ways for me personally to blow off steam and have a little fun, but what are some things that I can do to decrease the amount of “funk” that follows me home from the office in the first place?

Here at Lifefitter, we believe that it is important for individuals to de-stress, and a company as a whole needs to make time for engaging, fun, activities. We plan outings with our whole team. We go out to lunch together as a group. We even tailgate together every home football game. (Go Gamecocks!)

The main benefit of these company activities is an increased understanding of the things that drive your co-workers. It’s one thing to sit beside someone in an office all day. It’s something completely different to learn about their family, their interests, or just generally relate to them on a new level. Of course, once you’ve formed that deeper connection with Steve down in Accounting, it’s always a blast to pepper him in bright green paintballs and taunt his [lack of] crazy-good paintball skills.

If you and the people you spend most of your day with can’t laugh together, how can you ever expect to accomplish goals together? Your job can be one of the most stressful things in your life. If you could take 50% of the stress out wouldn’t you want to? Well, the easiest way to start is by organizing any sort of activity outside of work. It doesn’t have to be crazy or anything. Just go have a group lunch, or spend a Sunday afternoon watching the game with your new buddies from IT.

Developing a level of comfort with your co-workers inherently leads to a calmer, happier you, and I think that’s something we can all get behind, right?

Posted by: Josh

Authoritative expression in the long-tail

2008-09-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

As with most social media firms, a key component of our business model is the creation of User Generated Content (“UGC”). However, simply having users fill your database with gobs of content is not a golden ticket to high Google rankings and massive organic search traffic. If this were the case, every Google result would be clouded with MySpace pages and random blog posts.

So why doesn’t UGC normally score high in organic search? Well, there are many reasons (we could write a pretty thick book and not cover it all) but the single biggest is that most UGC represents the voice of one person and the content is not authoritative.

Dictionary.com defines authoritative as “substantiated or supported by documentary evidence and accepted by most authorities in a field.”

So, does a blog post from Joe Public titled “The best place to SCUBA dive in North America is Key West” meet the definition of authoritative? Probably not, and if a user performs a Google search for ‘Key West SCUBA Diving’ they are not likely to find Joe’s post in the top results, but look what’s there at number 3, the Wikipedia page for ‘Key West’.

Now, if you have ever done a search on Google you have seen result listings of UGC from Wikipedia. Why do Wikipedia pages rank so high in organic search? Again, that’s a long story but the biggest reason is the authoritative nature of this content.

Wikipedia represents a collaborative effort from a large user base to provide the most authoritative content on a given topic. Instead of having all Wikipedia contributors telling their own version of the story they all work together and speak with a fact based single voice. Millions of websites then link to these Wikipedia pages for reference. This teaches Google that the content is useful and should score high in search but none of this would have ever happened if the content were not collaborative, and therefore authoritative, in the first place.

A big downside of doing UGC the Wikipedia way is that it robs people of self-expression, which is a big motivator to create UGC. For example, Wikipedia is no place for Joe’s post giving Key West the best dive spot designation. If Joe was not able to express this opinion in his writings he might not even have the desire to create the content. While Wikipedia has a fanatical user base it’s numbers pale in comparison to the people like Joe creating more expressive content on other sites.

So, our goal with the Lifefitter platform is to give our members the tools to create authoritative content without taking away the self-expression that makes UGC fun and entertaining. How are we going to do it? Well, we won’t go into all of that just yet, but stay tuned.

Post by: Jeff

a minor milestone is reached...

2008-09-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd jump on the blog and announce that we have unveiled our 15th brand to the world. PaintSmack.com was put up yesterday and in the normal format we are taking beta invites. The creative team hopes to have about 10 more online in the next few weeks before the platform goes live.

So, what's going on with the platform? Well, we've been mapping some architecture stuff to ensure the scalability we need is right from day 1 and we've been doing some speed enhancement on the framework for the past week or so. This has meant a bit of a slow down in the feature development but we want to make sure our platform is super stable from the start.

Hopefully next week we'll be back full time on the user interface and the feature set. We are going to start on the mapping module the following week and figure that will take 10-14 days.

Obviously, we would like to have the platform tomorrow. To be honest, the buzz that's being created by our brand announcements is way more than we expected. It appears that some of our audience channels are just very hungry for a site that meets their needs. For example, ReefDrift already has over 20,000 fans on facebook. That's pretty insane when you figure how small the SCUBA demographic is but obviously they are a passionate group looking forward to a website to call their own.

Well, back to the dungeon.

Post by: Jeff

A lesson learned the hard way.

2008-09-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was reading an article in the September issue of Inc. Magazine about the company Skullcandy. For those that don’t know, they make headphones and target the youth market.

In the article, Skullcandy CEO Rick Alden was talking about their marketing strategy and how his entire advertising budget goes towards reaching the “core” segment of the action sports community. He offered a quote that said, “Conservative guys buy core products, but core guys will never buy conservative.”

We learned that lesson first hand this week when a couple of pro skateboarders named Steve Berra and Eric Koston decided they really, really, really think our skating brand Fatboned sucks a fat….well, you get the point.

Their post was merciless and pretty much took us to the woodshed for not understanding the skating culture. Some of their readers even said we were trying to harm the community by popularizing skateboarding.

Our intention with Fatboned, like all of our brands, is to provide the community it supports with unique tools to make new connections and enjoy their affinity even more. We are not working to create content or position ourselves as experts (that’s what the users are for) but the way this brand was blown up by the hardcore audience goes to show what a minefield web 2.0 has become. Fatboned has not even launched yet (we are just taking beta invite requests) and already the brand is on the ropes.

Our take-aways from this are to be sure we always step back and consider how our brands will appeal to the core (or hardcore in this case) segment of the audience. Apparently we missed something on Fatboned whether it be the name, the logo, the imagery or all of the above.

I modified his expression a little by changing the word ‘core’ to ‘hardcore’ but after the Fatboned debacle I printed Alden’s saying and hung it on the wall.

As for Fatboned, we are working the PR beat to put some spin on the situation in an attempt to turn the tides of core perception. At worst, we’ll end up losing a brand while learning a great lesson. At best, we might snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and end up with an even stronger brand that weathered a pretty rough storm. Stay tuned.

In closing on this day I would just like to take a moment and say NEVER FORGET 9-11-01.

Post by: Jeff

Lifefitter enters the blogosphere...

2008-09-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Well, we've been working away in the dungeon for a long time but we haven't documented much (read as anything) in the form of a corporate time line or blog. So, we have decided to change that and start an official blog.

Josh's test post will stay on the blog since it is technically the first thing ever posted on the blog (we're big on "firsts" in our office) but this is the first real post..

Right now we are working like crazy on 2 things.

1) the Lifefitter Platform (LP) that will power all of our social networks.

2) Polishing our first wave of brands and promoting our upcoming beta releases.

So far we have 12 sites taking beta invitation requests. We hope to have 25 brands online to participate in the LP release.

We are not trying to copy (or replace) generic social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Copying their features with a niche theme will accomplish nothing.

Instead, we will bring people together around common interests and foster not only existing relationships but also help create new ones which is something generic networks don't do well. Helping our members make new friends that share their interests is Lifefitter's primary objective.

We have some good ideas for the beta release and we'll see how they play out. We'll take the time to listen to our members and iterate LP to best achieve this goal.

All of that said, we won't be using this blog for corporate propaganda (well, not exclusively anyway - that's what press releases are for). Our goal with this blog is to allow team members to tell the world about our work and everything else we're up to. From clients to potential employees and business partners the blog will serve up the useful and the useless...all things Lifefitter.

We're excited about our journey and we're pleased to have you reading about it.

test

2008-09-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

this is a test post to see colors and layout.