Testing SmashRun's Friends Report
SmashRun recently released a new feature, called "Friends Report", whose goal is to give you more insight into how your friends' running is going. Let's have a look!
SmashRun
I covered SmashRun in details in an article last year, please have a look at that article for more details.
New Features!
The SmashRun team is quite small (they're only 3 folks: Jacklyn, Steve and Chris), but nevertheless, they keep adding new features and improving existing ones.
You usually get notice of improvement via a small notification icon, and that's how I saw that - which redirected me to the blog article about Friends Report.
Friends Report
What is it?
From this blog post:
"The problem is that it can be hard to keep track of [what your friends have been up to]. Have they started running regularly again? Was that last race a personal record? Did they really run before 6am three times last week?"
And Friends Report aims at "fixing" that - i.e. giving you that visibility, so that you can congratulate them!
Enabling it
As explained in the blog article, just send an email to hi@smashrun.com, and the team will add you as a beta-tester - which is what I did, and in about 30 minutes, Chris got back to me, confirming that the feature was enabled, and asking me to test it and provide feedback :)
Configuring it
You just need to go in the Settings > Report section, and then you can:
- enable/disable Friends report,
- select which additional information you want to include,
- resend the report.
The configuration looks like this:
You can also include the following leaderboards:
Quite fun if you want to see how other SmashRun runners are performing.
How does it look
OK, so now that we've seen what can be configured, let's see how the email you receive looks like.
You'll receive this email every Tuesday.
You'll receive a report for yourself, as well as any active friend.
In the above email, you can see some interesting/fun information, for both me and the friend listed, such as:
- elevation gained last week,
- how many kilometers minimum where run in consecutives weeks,
- if the mileage ran last week is the most in the X past weeks.
After I tweaked a bit the configuration of Friends Report, the report I received on the 2nd week looked a bit different:
You can see things like the distribution of my runs in the week, longest and earliest run, and also see for how many days your friends didn't run ;)
Wrap Up
I like Friends Report - it's a fun, addictive new way to discover what your friends have been up to, with a different angle, compared with what you would see on a daily basis: for instance, it's not easy to see that a friend increase his elevation gain 400% last week compared with the previous week; Friends Report allows this kind of view, and I like it a lot!
Tags: Running