Beeminder is now officially launched and open to the public. Invite all your loser friends who need a kick in the pants! If you’re just tuning in, here’s the three-sentence version of what Beeminder is:
Beeminder is like StickK.com (cash commitment contracts to force yourself to lose weight, not procrastinate, etc) for data nerds. We link your commitment contract to a graph of your progress: the commitment is to keep all of your data points on a yellow brick road that we draw on your graph. This turns a long-term commitment into a daily commitment, forcing you to make slow but steady progress until you reach your goal.
♥ β ♥
If you’re not just tuning in then you’re probably one of our amazing beta users. So, Thank You! We can’t begin to tell you how grateful we are for your thoughtful feedback and encouragement. We really would’ve been lost without you, almost literally. If it weren’t for supporting you, we would have spent all our time making wibble widgets, when what you really needed was wobble widgets. (Actually, seriously — did anyone see the original version of the road dial? Yeah.) Thanks for letting us make you more awesome, and for making us more awesome with all your feedback. Not to mention the 30 thousand data points you entered or replied to the bot with (and that doesn’t count imported data). You all are the best. And special thanks to the LessWrong community.
Following our progress
Here’s what to follow to keep up with what’s going on with Beeminder, in increasing order of requisite degree of fandom:
- Infrequent announcements or tidbits, including pointers to blog posts: twitter.com/bmndr
- The blog itself. You’re on it.
- Our feedback forum at uservoice.beeminder.com (or click the red feedback button on any beeminder.com page) — we take this seriously and participate actively in it ourselves
- Under penalty of a $1000 commitment contract, we will tweet on average 1 User-Visible Improvement to Beeminder per day at twitter.com/beemuvi
- The Akratics Anonymous discussion group