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.

New sport types added today:

Freediving, Streetball, Roller derby, Springboard diving, Infrared sauna, Wheelchair curling, Simplefit, Swamp walking, Swamp running, Swamp football, Car washing, Suburi, Water skiing, Trikke, Mölkky, MBT-walking, Kundalini yoga, Line dancing, Belly dancing, Back exercises, Rug washing, Rescue dog activity, Spear fishing, Bailing hay, Baby swimming, Croquet, Bodyharmony, Moonwalk, Parallel bars, Bandy, Painting, Synchronized skating, SHAPE, Wife carrying,  Flexi-bar, Deep stretching, Ab wheel, P90X, Diabolo, Motorcycle trials, Open water swimming, Trail running,  Aviation, Stable work, Touch rugby, Kung fu, Canine freestyle, Skike, Irish dancing, Afro, Motocross, Canyoning, Miniature golf, Oriental dance. Huh! ; )

If there are issues with terminology or translations in any of the sports, please let us know!

A special request to our users: as you may have noticed, our sport icon creation is sometimes lagging a bit behind and we use our generic H! icon for some sports. If you have the required Photoshopping skills, we can share our sport icon PSD templates with you, so that you can create an icon for your favourite sport (either creating a new icon or to fix an existing one).

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!

We’re happy to announce that we reached 250 000 exercises logged in HeiaHeia.com today!

Last month’s top 10 activities were cycling, running, walking, gym, stretching, jogging (for the more relaxed runners ; ), swimming, walking the dog, football, and golf. The tail is long, as we support around 300 different activities.

On the development side, we’ve been busy with our currently most popular user requests: #1 getting more entertaining and informative stats out of the training log data, #2 special new entry tools (we’ll save the details of these for the launch announcement ; ), #3 enriched user level system, and finally more sports (we have a backlog of about 20-30 new sports right now – sorry for the delay in deploying them!). We’ll be launching these & some smaller surprise features during the following weeks – not in this exact order, more likely in an “order of simplicity”.

Also, we’ve been talking to a number of services in different fields regarding the possibility to link users’ accounts in different services using our API. First news coming soon, more to follow in August.

Happy midsummer – Hyvää juhannusta!

Our earlier submission in the Ovi Store is a Web Runtime version supporting S60 3.2 and S60 5.0 devices.

Both the apps are in principle “wrappers”: icons in the homescreen, which open the mobile browser optimized version of HeiaHeia.

You can book a URL of your choice for your public profile (from Settings -> Privacy), with the format www.heiaheia.com/user/yournamehere. Please don’t use any offensive or dirty language here though!  Tip: you need to log out of the service to see your public profile. If you’re logged in, the URL takes you to your “internal” profile page.

If you’d like to share more (or less) things in the public page, just let us know! As always, any other comments, feedback & ideas also very much welcome.