It’s that (randomly-chosen) time of year, folks! The time we brag about all the awesome press Beeminder’s been getting. Our excuse to do this today is that the legendary Amby Burfoot just published an article about Beeminder and StickK and behavioral economics in Runner’s World online. Before that we were in print in Shape Magazine and, more excitingly, featured in the Portland Business Journal (also in actual print), and we’re in John Havens’s soon-to-be-released book, Hacking Happiness.
Here are some other places we’ve been featured:
- Steve Klabnik’s been talking us up around the internets, like citing us front and center in his 2013 year in review, and again in a podcast he gives a glowing, detailed testimonial of Beeminder (along with Lift).
- Scott Krager of SERPs wrote about beeminding User-Visible Improvements just like we do (and is up to $270 on the line as of this writing).
- Nate Kontny announced the Beeminder/Draft integration.
And for completeness, here’s everything else we know about since last time we did this…
This article on gamification quotes us extensively (and a version of it was previously in print in The Social Media Monthly). There were testimonials by Dr Kyra Gaunt, who says she “thrives by” Beeminder, and this math and computer science blogger who “couldn’t be happier with the results”. Cardsharp.ly describes Beeminder as “the most powerful productivity tool I know”. Jack gives a detailed review of his past year of beeminding, and Alex Vermeer has publicly posted his Beeminder goals, a trend we certainly hope will catch on. Social pressure FTW!
We’re so great that some people just can’t stop talking about us. There have been a number of posts on Visa’s blog that focus on Beeminder, and Tomasz Wegrzanowski has discussed his beeminding success twice. And of course, we can’t stop talking about ourselves either, like in this interview of Danny.
We absolutely loved this detailed and insightful synopsis of what Beeminder’s all about. We were also included in a number of roundups of useful apps and productivity tools including two such posts on Tech Cocktail, and this Cool App-titude post.
Our customer service has gotten noticed by bloggers discussing our auto-canceling subscriptions and praising our email strategy. While others, like Giant Robot Lasers, have offered us usability advice, as did this blog.
There have been people using Beeminder for the usual: limiting candy bars, succeeding at school, and running. And these two bloggers have been keeping their blogging goals visible on their sidebars. For more creative beeminding ideas read this post on Museless Aiming, or check out this Beeminder showcase from Ben Eills.
Speaking of creativity, our users have made scripts for word count and pomodoro-tracking, a Beeminder timer bookmarklet, and an IFTTT recipe for updating Beeminder with completed RTM tasks.
We’ve twice been compared to StickK (not counting the Runner’s World article we led this post with), and came out very well in this crowd-sourced descriptive ratings of akrasia management techniques, and of course there have been countless little blurbs that mention us briefly. (But only if you can’t count very high.)
If you prefer your media more of the social subset, you’ll be pleased to know we now have our own subreddit, and this blog post that talks about using Beeminder for maintaining consistent blogging was one of a few things made the front page of Hacker News. Meanwhile we’ve gotten some love on Reddit, including this comment.
For those of you who don’t like reading (yet have inexplicably read this far) you can also listen to the iProcrastinate podcast, which has a great discussion of Beeminder starting at 0:55, or watch Paul Fenwick discuss Beeminder in this video, or just look at this cool picture (which involves reading… sorry!). This nerds-only Beeminder Screensaver doesn’t require reading, but does require cloning a git repository.
Finally, if you happen to speak Russian I’m sure this is a wonderful post as well. We must be super-duper popular in Sweden because there are two Beeminder mentions in Swedish blogs. And this blog post in Polish says “Beeminder is responsible for saving the world. There would literally not be a world right now if it weren’t for Beeminder.” Or at least that’s how I translate it.
PS: People continue to do awesome things with our API and we’ve updated the list of links to such things in our original blog post announcing our API.
Illustration by Daniel Chang, borrowed from the Runner’s World article that this press roundup leads with