Here’s a tidbit that came out of Macworld last week. A company called Frog Design is working on an iPhone app called Temptd, a “health-based social networking app.”
Let’s parse that concept: Temptd is a game that uses your iPhone to get other people to help you eat healthier. It sounds like a cross between foursquare and twitter, for dieters.
Here’s the deal–when you get the urge for a doughnut (this happens to me surprisingly often, since there’s a Krispy Kreme–with a drive-thru–right next to Toby’s high school), you use Temptd to post a message saying you’ve been, you know–tempted. The message goes to your Facebook account (not sure about twitter); if you can resist the temptation for a certain amount of time, you get points (thus the game component). You’ll be able to encourage other people, helping them stay on track, which in turn helps your game stats.
It’s an interesting idea; it just so happens that late last night I tweeted about how I was trying to resist a bedtime snack, and a couple of my twitter “friends” told me to stay strong–so I did. No snack.
Social media is a fascinating new force in the world, and I think the newness of it all makes it hard to know exactly how strong an influence our “virtual” friends really are in our lives. I haven’t hooked our new bathroom scale up to twitter yet; I keep meaning to, but every time I sit down to do it, I think up an excuse not to. On some level, I know that if even just a handful of people start seeing my daily weight in their tweetstream, I will have proven to myself that social media work on a really creepy level–I’ll feel compelled to lose weight, so as not to humiliate myself in the “twitterverse.”
The question, for Temptd, is whether the peer pressure of networks like Facebook and twitter are stronger than the pull of that neon “Hot” sign in the Krispy Kreme window. What do you think–will an iPhone app help you resist temptation?