HeiaHeia has had a relatively high share of female users ever since our launch in Christmas 2009. We think that being appealing to both genders is a key proof point of our idea: bringing positive motivation for keeping fit.

This positive motivation is driven by cheering each other and sharing positive feelings. We didn’t want to be driven e.g. by guilt or by technology, two classic drivers of fitness products and services (also many very popular services – these drivers obviously work, we just thought there would be room also for something else in the market. ; )

During the last 30 days, the gender equal trend has taken over HeiaHeia: 51% of new registered users in August were women! Big thumbs up for all of you!!! And for the men as well. ; )

Another insipiring piece of news: yesterday was our busiest day ever in terms of new user registrations, beating the old record by a clear margin.

Life’s good, HeiaHeia!

For those who want to do this manually, we now support uploading GPX files with entries (you’ll find this option under “Show more” in relevant activities). One practical tip: if you leave the distance and duration fields empty, they’ll be auto-filled with data from the GPX file.

Comments or feedback on this? Please let us know!

PS. All kinds of cool new stuff is in the making, please keep on sending requests for new features & comments on old ones.

Addressing the first issue, here’s how it works: we’re calculating a score on your general activity in HeiaHeia with our secret formula (TM). Sources close to the matter say that at least your exercises logged, number of friends, profile completeness, cheering and commenting activity, as well as usage of more or less all other features in the service, have an effect on the score. Each level you earn gives you more special icons to cheer your friends with.

To address the other points, we’ve done a couple of changes to the system: We dropped the levels a bit. As a result, the creme de la creme will reach a completely new level: diamond! Also, as we say in Finland, “saavutetuista eduista ei tingitä”, i.e. you get to keep the levels you reach, we’re not dropping you back anymore.

The service outage was caused by a hardware failure at our hosting provider (the company from whom we rent virtual servers to run HeiaHeia.com). It took about three hours for them to get the system up and running again, after which the rest of the evening was spent by us repairing the database that got corrupted due to the hardware failure. This was a rather typical case: in the real world, sometimes something like this just happens. For this kind of occasions, we keep a double set of back-ups in different locations, but in this case we didn’t have to resort to them.

Thank you for your patience with the situation & please let us know, if there’s something weird in HeiaHeia after the crash!

You can now define the privacy settings separately for maps attached to training log entries. Maps can be shared with 1) nobody 2) your HeiaHeia friends 3) all HeiaHeia members 4) 1-3 and external services like Facebook.

If a map is shared on Facebook, it’ll look like the attached screenshot with a couple of cool old-timers discussing their activities.

Based on popular demand, we’ll also be adding “upload GPX” among “Show all options” in new entry creation. This one is not yet done, but coming soon.

A couple of fun media stories from this week:

YleX, a nation-wide youth focused radio station from Finland, covered us in their Surffilauta show. The story is in Finnish, but there’s a hilarious Heia-Heia song (at 2:34) which translates universally. ; )

Eesti Päevaleht, a leading newspaper in Estonia, covered us in a story referring to Digitark, a technology blog. Digitark’s story on HeiaHeia is very thorough and positive! (Tip: Google Translate will help.)

We’ll be re-writing our Facebook app over the coming weeks. Here’s the first taster: HeiaHeia entries on Facebook are now richer & more visual. The new style is already in use for the first users, all of the user base should be migrated during today. Our Facebook app users: just log an exercise & tell us what you think!

It’s been a great ride with lots of highlights: over 250 000 exercises logged, nearly 50 000 cheers given, over 25 000 comments made, thousands of user requests for improving the service, great amounts of new members joining the service every day, plenty of heart-warming comments from people ranging from athletes to participants of rehab programs – from web professionals to laymen enjoying the service, etc, etc.

We listed our near-future development plans in our previous blog post. A number of user requests are still left for the medium term plans – and please keep on sending new requests to help us improve the service even further!

HeiaHeia for the next 6 months!