Gimme20 to Launch Social Networking Site for Workout enthusiasts

By Vivek Puri | September 12th, 2006 at 01:06 am ET         

Gimme20 is the latest social networking site with a twist. Gimme20 provides platform, tools, and support in a collaborative environment for achieving a healthy body and mind. Gimme20 is a bootstrapped startup based out of Vancouver, Canada. Gimme20 has a team of 4 smart developers headed by Jordan Willms looking to officially launch in October.

Gimme20 is a feature rich site. You start off by creating your profile that gives a personalized URL to each user, choice of metric system, setting up messaging options, picture uploading, and your location. You can than browse workouts by muscle group and difficulty level or by tags like abs, back, legs,….Either case, you get to select from one of the many workouts submitted by Gimme20 users and industry professionals. If nothing suits your needs you can always create your own workout and exercises. Each workout contains details and order of exercises to be performed. You can add these workouts to your profile and start working on them. From there on, workout results can be saved in Gimme20, which will also maintain your workout history. You can track your weight and the trend over time is displayed on a graph.

Gimme20 can create blog entries that can be tagged, commented, subscribed, and also support attaching of files. Gimme20 also sports discussion forums where users can discuss a variety of health and fitness related topics. You can also have a look at activity of members in your local community.

From the Social networking aspect, you can add other users to your buddylist. You can also checkout users on someone’s buddylist, and on whose buddylist you are present. For each workout Gimme20 displays a list of people using it and from where you can jump on to there profile and find people with similar interests as yours. Users can also send private messages, and send a shout to other users. Another nice feature is that the workout difficulty levels, and muscle groups are hyperlinked that help in easy navigation from one to another.

However you need to keep in mind that Gimme20 does not seem to support other forms of exercise like yoga, aerobics. Hence you are limited to workouts, which are focused on muscle groups. As an addition, Gimme20 should allow users to embed videos in the exercise details and provide a way for advanced users to monetize their content and workouts. There should also be a way to differentiate between regular users and pros with some kind of user rating system according to type of exercises created by a user, comments, blog posts, and more. This will enhance the collaboration among users instead of Gimme20 being just a data store of workouts.

Gimme20 is looking at advertising for revenues. Off course they can try to hookup with sporting industry for additional funds if the site catches on. Overall, Gimme20 is well executed but needs direction and work to attract top users who will than pull the rest. I don’t know how many people will be interested in joining Gimme20 just for workouts, which is true for any new niche social network. As for competition, there is another startup Traineo with somewhat similar concept.

Links:
Gimme20

Tags: StartupSquad, Web2.0, Web_2.0, SocialNetworking