Wow, what an autumn it has been! It has come and gone so fast. By Christmas 2009 a major milestone was reached – Moozement moved from Alpha to Beta phase. Most of my time and efforts went into development of the service – and it was exciting time of super intensive work in a small, but very dedicated team.

Beta version brought with it new professional design, easier to use interface, new interaction concepts, new sports, new faster servers.  We decided to change the name of the service as well and were inspired by a hypnotic Heia! Heia! chant that Norwegians use to support their cross-country skiers and other athletes. We named our service HeiaHeia to give it a spell of positive cheering among friends.

Sports and wellbeing are hot markets both regarding hardware and web service innovation. HeiaHeia’s focus is on the social aspect of sports – mastering the ways in which friends can motivate each other in a positive spirit, without being overly competitive. The difference between us and most of the other players is that we want to provide a service which anybody can use. You don’t need any kind of technical gear to use the service, and the service itself is as easy to use as Facebook.

The HeiaHeia philosophy on sports is that everything counts. HeiaHeia already supports over 250 different types of sports, most of them requested by users of the service. Understanding user behaviour and user requests will remain a guiding principle in the development of HeiaHeia.

Work doesn’t stop here, and new functionalities will be introduced on a weekly basis going forward, in a true Web 2.0 mode of development.We are looking forward to a very exciting year ahead.

Jyri Engeström wrote some time ago about the case for object-centered sociality: “‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. I could not agree with him more. The glue of each community is something that unites them – common interest, social object. When you join new social network, you typically start by building your social graph – re-establishing links to the real people you know, checking if they have already registered, inviting those whom you would like to see in the new environment. But there must be something beyond the initial phase of building the social graph. And this is the problem that haunts giants like Facebook and MySpace. You cannot possibly have common interest with everyone, and you don’t want to share the same things with everyone.

While Facebook is still growing strongly, it’s morphing into some sort of a generic social utility. Thanks to the Platform API there are all kinds of applications available on Facebook, some of them creating social objects (like Circle of Moms or Cities I’ve Visited), but it feels like true passions of people are quite rare in generic networks. When it comes to your most important hobbies, you might want to share your thoughts and data with other likeminded people and not necessarily with all aquaintances on Facebook. This is one of the reasons why specialized social networks are thriving. Dogster.com and catster.com are two perfect examples of such networks with very strong social objects. Mark Andreesen‘s creation Ning – a place where everyone can build own social network – already has hundreds of thousands of networks.