Wellsphere Launches Wellness 2.0

Wellshpere is launching an alpha version of their wellness community site tomorrow. It joins a host of other health related search, training, and Q&A sites we’ve covered. Wellsphere is concerned with day-to-day sorts of health choices that make up “wellness”, the kind you don’t ask your doctor, but consult your peers about. Wellsphere is meant to help people with these choices and motivation by providing users with access to similar people and to health-related resources in their area. These resources are split between personal profiles and databases of health-related locations they’ve put together.

Their personal profiles are much like any social networking site with the addition of a blog like feature called a “Wellsphere”. Wellspheres are comment threads attached to your profile dealing with a goal you want to accomplish or some specific knowledge you have about being healthy. Any registered user can subscribe to updates on the sphere or add to the conversation by posting their own input. You can imagine there being a lot of duplicate discussions, which Wellsphere deals with by allowing members to vote for other users by “endorsing” them.

Instead of purely making friends, like on social networking sites, Wellsphere has “activity partners”. The hope is that people are more likely to keep up their fitness goals if they schedule activities as part of a group of people who depend on them to show up, and I agree. However, while the search function lets you find people in your area with similar interests, activity planning is left up to members. It seems like a MatchActivity-like solution, matching up people training for a marathon, or weight training once a week would be an ideal addition. EmilyR seems like a perfect candidate for this, considering she’s already looking for a running partner.

The final part of the site is the databases for health related places like gyms and therapists, as well as healthy restaurant suggestions. You can search the databases by location, to look for gyms or maybe a chiropractor in your area. It even looks like you can filter your search by what kind of music the gym plays. The databases link up with the rest of the site by including what listing what members go there, making it easier to find workout buddies in your area.