Intelligent Eating with My Diet Friends
10th of September 2007 by conor
This site, which is about diet and not just dieting, concentrates on the content instead of the technology. I've been monitoring progress in the open beta for nearly a year and they are almost ready for launch. The tagline of Eating well together captures the intent of the site perfectly.
My Diet Friends is run by husband and wife team Haydn and Roos. The idea behind the site was originally motivated by the serious illness of Roos and their journey to find a healthy approach to eating that could be an integral part of their lives rather a short-lived fad diet or worthy but tasteless meals.
They have put together a deep content site which mixes editorial and member contributions in addition to competitions, polls and shopping. The latter is particularly interesting as it was user initiated. Very soon after the site went live they started receiving enquires from people asking how they could buy some of the products which were mentioned on the site.
The main way for users to contribute is via their Diet Blogs on the site and by commenting on the both other user's blogs and the editorial. I have seen lots of positive feedback between users there. One small criticism I would make is that the main section content does not have an identified author so it is not clear if it all comes from the editors or if they promote member stories to the various content sections.
The editors also have a related news on the web section and a small blogroll. I'd love to see more content syndicated from and by users themselves. This could done whilst retaining editorial control of the front page. There is a main RSS feed for the site but it doesn't look like there are any more fine-grained ones. This is probably not an issue for the bulk of the users.
The site itself uses the standard scoophost platform but Haydn is eager for users to get involved in modifying many aspects of the site that they don't like or think they can improve. Whether that's the GUI, widgets or SEO, they are open to being led by the users so that they can concentrate on their area of expertise – content (not surprising, given that Haydn is a journalist).
So many sites in Web2 take the approach of here's our empty site, please fill it for us whereas My Diet Friends says here is a lot of well researched, carefully considered pieces we have written, we'd love if you could work with us to our mutual benefit.
There is a wide range of people who would find a site like this useful; those who might not know how to cook, find it difficult to make judgements about a balanced diet, fear the repercussions of eating the wrong food, or who may just want to diet. They do have a programme that they call The Core Diet which consists of a repertoire of 40 recipes that you can constantly use to bring your diet back into line in a sustainable way and which will keep you healthy. My favourite line from Haydn is:
Intelligent eating is knowing how to balance out the crap
Trying to lose weight whilst remaining healthy can be a very solitary activity and sites like My Diet Friends fill a genuine need. You get guidance, support, great content and a sense of belonging to a community. In fact, it is what real social networking is all about.
Comment posted by haydn
at 9/10/2007 8:28:44 AM
Scoop is what powers http://www.kuro5hin.org/ which is one of the earliest social media sites and very tech orinted originally – and of course it is a GPL site so built by community for community. It seems to be very modular and can be built on relatively easily but because its core users are tech folks they've been happy with where it's come from. So the answer is it could be developed in interesting ways probably without APIs. It is open source anyway and well documented.
Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 9/10/2007 8:16:05 AM
You touch on a very important point there Haydn. All sites claim that they are interested in user feedback but few do it very well.
Until recently I was really impressed with what the Twitter guys were doing. The use of the informal @username convention became widespread on the site so they added formal support for it. They seemed to monitor user behaviour quite closely and work with it. Sadly in recent times they look to be focused on fluff which may be a function of receiving a serious investment injection.
In your case, does the use of Scoop help or hinder things? Does it have APIs or developer support so that technical users could build things for My Diet Friends or do mashups with other sites (e.g. weight trackers)? Given the sedentary nature of many developers, you probably stand a good chance of getting plenty of them using the site!
Comment posted by haydn
at 9/10/2007 7:38:03 AM
hi Conor and thanks for writing about us. There is indeed a way to promote stories to the front page through voting but we have not implemented it yet. It's one of those things where you think the community should decide on how it might work so we're just holding off until we understand the technology better and the community. The articles can carry the writer's details too but we wanted to build the content first without having our names spalshed across the site.
You are right too about our attitude towards content and technology. We do content pretty well and we hope the community will draw in people who want to do the technology and push it in ways that enhance the community. We're completely open to cooperating with people who know the tech side – it seems to us social media should involve people in all aspects of the site not just in providing content.