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Do Twitter and Weight Loss Mix?

by Chris Hall on November 16, 2009 · Comments

Withings Wi-Fi scale at home

Both Engadget and Livewell 360 have recently reported on the Withings Connected Body Scale which tracks your body weight, body fat, and lean mass along with how many more pounds you have to go to reach your desired weight.

That’s awesome, and what’s great about it is that since it’s WiFi enabled it can send that data to a program on your iPhone so that you can do cool things with it.

The New News

Withings has now given the scale an ability to tweet your results, via Twitter, to all of your followers on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. 

I really like the concept of Social Health, but would you feel comfortable broadcasting the particulars of the space you occupy to everybody who follows you? Is this too much information for a general population?

I’m interested to get your take on this newly formed Twitter integration.  Is this a good or bad thing, or do you even care about it? Let us know in the comments.

 

 

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Popularity: 8% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

Twitter throwdown – Yankees vs. Phillies

by Greg Matthews on November 4, 2009 · Comments

Guess where the world series epicenter is?

Guess where the world series epicenter is?

The 2009 World Series won’t just be settled on the field … just like most other significant “real-life” events, half the fun is happening on twitter.

Anyone who’s been to a professional conference in the last year has probably been surprised to see a growing number of heads hunched over laptops and iPhones – and talking about weird things called “hashtags.”

And it is a little strange at first … but the backchannel can be almost as interesting (ok, sometimes more interesting) than the main event.  For the first time, that should be the case in the world series as well.  If you’ve been spending any time on TPS lately (and judging from our Google Analytics account, you have!), you’ve probably noticed that the New York/Philly/Boston corridor tends to generate a lot of noise great content.  Naturally with the Phillies playing the Yankees in the World Series, that situation is only going to be exacerbated.

It’s been fascinating to watch the Yankees search over the last few days.  Yankees fans are normally full of bravado, but it only took one dominant performance from Cliff Lee in game one for them to adopt an air of uncertainty.  As they went on to win the next 3 games, guess what – the bravado was back!

The Phillies search is a microcosm of Phils fans themselves … You can follow the emotional expletives that are the equivalent of the home fans booing the home team, and the just-as-emotional support after a big win.  I definitely plan to have both searches updating live as I watch game six … and, no offense to the Yankees fans out there, but I can tell you that I am definitely hoping for a game seven!

So baseball-geography-watching is another use for TPS and its geo-search functions; I’ve been using it to connect with fans of the Arizona Fall League (kind of a “minor league all-stars league”).  It’s a rather esoteric fan-base limited to serious baseball geeks (I’m meeting one of the folks I “met” for a game when I visit Phoenix next week) – which makes it perfect for using TPS as the find-and-interact tool, since you can follow, re-tweet and reply right from the tool.

How are you using TPS?  Is it a part of your business yet?  We’d love to know – the comments are all yours!

Popularity: 14% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

New Map Toggler on myTPSreport.com

by Chris Hall on October 28, 2009 · Comments

Last week I wrote about an interesting use case for myTPSreport.com in a post called Fast Food Nation.  This week I want to let you know about a tricked out feature that I have come to enjoy a lot.  We call it the Map Toggler because it allows you to toggle between a regular sized Google Map and an enlarged Google map within the tweet positioning system tool.

You can find the map toggler underneath the bottom left corner of the map in regular view. Here is what the screen looks like in enlarged mode:

myTPSreport.com Large View

myTPSreport.com Large View

To be totally up front, this functionality was inspired by the site Trendsmap, which is a Twitter Trend / Google Maps mash-up that we think is really cool. 

Trendsmap Interface Inspiration

Trendsmap Interface Inspiration

There is just something about the map being used as an info-graphics workspace, with floating interactive boxes that may be opened or closed at will that gets me going in the morning…

Let Us Know What You Think

We want to try to add functionality on a weekly basis. That’s always the goal, right? So your feedback is important. Let me know what you think in the comments below or hit up the feedback tab on myTPSreport.com with your suggestions and feedback.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

Fast Food Nation

by Chris Hall on October 20, 2009 · Comments

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a little project we’ve been working on called myTPSreport.com. I’m really excited about the tool for several reasons: A. We were able to build an in-house team to solve some business problems; B. We were able to work with Security and IT and other internal partners to mash-up some third party tools; and C. We are able to share everything we’ve done with people inside and outside of company walls.

C. is huge, if you ask me…

We said we were going to shoot to release myTPSreport.com today and we were able to make that happen. This is a huge score! It’s out and available for everybody to tinker with, and we’re all pumped about that.

To get the word out, we decided to do interesting things with the tool and share the results here on Crumple it Up. The first thing I wanted to know was, is there a geographic difference among people talking about fast food, fruit and vegetables. It turns out that there is … here is what I found:

FINDINGS

Fast food. The first search I did was on the term “fast food.” You can see by the hotspots on the map where the term fast food is being discussed around the country. It looks like both coasts enjoy tweeting about the term fast food and that there are a lot of conversations happening east of the Mississippi.

TPSfastfood

Fruit Not as many conversations about “fruit” are going on throughout the country, but there seems to be intense use of the term along the west coast. Could this mean that people on the west coast are healthier than their eastern brethren?

TPSfruit

Vegetables It’s probably safe to say that the term “vegetables” is not in any danger of becoming a trending topic on Twitter. It looks like the term vegetables is just not used very much in tweets. When it is used, however, it is used west of the Mississippi.

TPSvegetables

YOUR TURN

Let me know what you think the ramifications of these findings are, and check out myTPSreport.com. Feel free to perform your own analysis around geographical topics and let me know what you come up with.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

The myTPSreport.com Back Story

by Chris Hall on October 5, 2009 · Comments

The Humana Innovation Center really got involved in social media in a big way last year with the Freewheelin’ bike-sharing program. During the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the social media team was charged with finding groups of bicycle enthusiasts in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul, who had organized into thriving communities.

There wasn’t an easy way to do it.

So we did what we could, ended up muscling through a steep learning curve, and had some struggles and some successes. We soon realized, however, that most of the things we’re doing in the Innovation Center are not mainstream. That led to an understanding that it would be really time consuming to continue to manually find conversations and, at the time, really expensive and cumbersome to pay to listen to fringe topics that may not lead us anywhere.

It’s easy to find people talking about Coke or Pepsi, for example, because they are established brands. We needed, and need, to find people talking about ideas and concepts that relate to making fun healthy, because that’s where our kind of innovation resides.

U.S. markets are just emerging around bike-sharing programs, games for health and health rewards programs. There aren’t millions of people talking about the things we are interested in; the things we want to build programs and products around.

We knew that we would have to build something ourselves, so we took a gamble with Twitter… and the idea for myTPSreport.com was born.

We’re excited to be able to see where conversations are happening, as they happen and think that other people will be too.

For the time being, myTPSreport.com is in limited private beta. However, we plan to release it to the public soon. In the mean time, you can learn more about how it can help you by clicking on this link. Make sure you sign up to receive a notification when it is released to the public, by attempting to create a new search.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.

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