I never thought I’d find a dieting website interesting, but today’s launch of DietTelevision is something that web 2.0 heads will want to take note of. The site is a directory of diet plans that combines user ratings and professional nutritionist analysis of various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption. It’s a relatively attractive Flash site that combines quality evergreen content and continually updated user reviews. I’m impressed.
Founded by a team of executives from online fashion retailer BlueFly, DietTelevision is primarily self funded. The company says it is based on two ideas: that dieting is hard and that community is one of the biggest factors in successful weight loss. The advertising opportunities are obviously substantial; at launch the site runs ads from Adidas, Timberland, Home Shopping Network and Self Magazine.
There is currently information available about 47 different diets. To search for a diet, users move 12 sliders to indicate which diet and food factors are most important to them. The site recommends which ones could best fit their needs. Users can also contribute off-site links related to any diet. It’s a great way to learn a whole lot about any diet before deciding to try it yourself. In some ways DietTelevision is similar to the aggregated medical treatment review site DailyStrength I wrote about yesterday. There are parts of the site that are obviously Amazon inspired as well. One nice thing about the company’s launch is that they have already populated their dataset with several hundred beta users, so you can already see the aggregation function working.
In the future the company will be greatly expanding its feature set. There are 80 video segments from nutritionists that will be included on the site. The company will offer a voice recognition tool that will recognize what diet you are on when you call on the phone and say “I’m at an Indian restaurant, what should I order?” There could be any number of sponsored widgets like a water tracker to keep track of how much your water consumption is increasing over time.
If you take a look at the site I think you’ll agree that it’s well designed, very professional in appearance and looks quite useful. Weight loss might not have seemed like an appropriate target for the 2.0 moniker, but as DietTelevision demonstrates well – many industries actually are.
DietTelevision is just rolling out of the gate; if you’re interested in niche Web 2.0 sites that provide real value to users and do it with class – this is a site to watch.
