Fitbit Launches Community Section within the App & Its Huge
Any platform without a strong community fails in the long term. While Fitbit has a strong community, there was no way to interact with the community, find new people, and the essence of a Social factor was majorly missing, until today. A Recent update to the Fitbit App has now enabled in-app community interaction & social engagement to find new people, and also connect with existing friends. The update was announced out on 29th of September.
After using it for a day, I would say that’s a great new experience as a long time Fitbit user. The feature was first enabled only for the US, but I do see it enabled in India as well, and it must be a global thing. Let’s take a look at the features:
Where is it located in the app?
Instead of Friends Tab, you will notice a community tab. It has three sections–Feed, Friends & Groups.
Groups:
The most important part is the Groups section which lets you join groups around topics like Food, Family, Feel Good, Get Moving, Near Me and so on. It also has other languages group, but it’s still limited to a couple of languages. You can post questions, photos, comment on a post, cheer your friends, share inspiration and updates.
It’s a great place for anybody who wants to find more people, something that was almost impossible before, and the only option was to find friends through the web version or using Contacts and Facebook.
Feed:
Any status updates from your friends or members of the group you are in shows up here. You can share your dashboard, exercises, photo, before & after, food, sleep, weight, hourly activity, badge, trophy or just any pic using your camera, or from your gallery. It’s almost a mix of Facebook & Twitter here. It’s limited, and I kind of like it this way.
Friends:
It’s the same as you have seen it before. No changes here.
My thoughts:
It took a lot of time for Fitbit to enable Community feature within the app, and while not everybody is going to like it, it brings all the Fitbit users in one place to communicate, and learn from each other. This is something missing in many Fitness Services. You have a chance to find people around you, get motivated from people working out, and living health around the globe, and not just limited to your friends.
I am sure this is going to work towards Fitbit in the long term as it matures. That said there are few things Fitbit should tweak in the community feature going forward:
- An option to set primary focus on either Groups, Friends or Feeds. Many would want to see Friends as the primary option.
- An option to turn off the feed completely for those who want to stay in a closed environment.
- Option not to display full name like before.
- Option to see feeds from one particular person only.
- Create a personal group with friends.
Overall, Community things will have to evolve with time, become more like Facebook, Twitter and make discoveries much eaier.
New Fitbit Profile and Privacy Settings
Along with community, Fitbit also has introduced & updated the existing profile and privacy settings.
Your current privacy setting—private, friends only, or public—is now always visible to you from your profile page; tap the tile to change it. To update which graphs (calorie intake, sleep, steps, etc.) are visible from the web version of your dashboard, select the Personal Stats tile.
Fitbit will now also display full names by default, so that you can easily know with whom you’re interacting and can make informed decisions about whether to accept a friend request. Prefer to be anonymous? It’s easy to set a username instead.
