THE NIKE FUELBAND MAKES EXERCISE ANALYTICS EASY, SO ONE FIRM REPURPOSED IT TO TRACK SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT INSTEAD.
Klout is an inherently cold product. It’s a tool interested in quantifying our popularity as a measurable stat–questionably useful for some industry professionals, but way too calculating for the casually self-aggrandizing social media user.
Yet something about this Nike Fuelband hack by Stinkdigital finds a way to bridge the gap of cut throat analytics with friendly usability. It’s calledTweetFuel, and it’s a digital hijacking of the Nike Fuelband that forces Nike+ to count tweets rather than steps.
Whenever someone tweets @stinkdigital, a modified Fuelband, hooked to a motor, spins. The more followers that person had, the longer the Fuelband spins. In an era of +1s and +Ks, it’s a somewhat silly, almost gameshow-esque reward for a social media mention. The even cooler level, though, is that the firm tweaked some of the Nike+ code to allow (okay, force) Nike’s built-in graph to measure all these tweets. So a few RTs become a parallel to a sprint in their interface. A story that goes viral could resemble a marathon through the day.
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Somewhat ironically, TweetFuel ends up resembling contemporary social media tools more than most exercise programs. Take one look at the Nike+ interface, and you’ll see glossy, branded analytics that look far more like Sprout Social than they do your average treadmill LCD. And that’s a reassuring thing. Graphs don’t all need to look like they’ve been crapped out by Excel anymore, not when we’ve all become such desk-dwelling data junkies.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/100x100_desaturate/476c0e9e1e9911e180c9123138016265_7-1.jpegMARK WILSON
Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, … CONTINUED
