How does it work?

Whenever someone tweets @stinkdigital, a modified Fuelband, hooked to a motor, spins. The more followers that person had, the longer the Fuelband spins. In an era of +1s and +Ks, it’s a somewhat silly, almost gameshow-esque reward for a social media mention. The even cooler level, though, is that the firm tweaked some of the Nike+ code to allow (okay, force) Nike’s built-in graph to measure all these tweets. So a few RTs become a parallel to a sprint in their interface. A story that goes viral could resemble a marathon through the day.


Somewhat ironically, TweetFuel ends up resembling contemporary social media tools more than most exercise programs. Take one look at the Nike+ interface, and you’ll see glossy, branded analytics that look far more like Sprout Social than they do your average treadmill LCD. And that’s a reassuring thing. Graphs don’t all need to look like they’ve been crapped out by Excel anymore, not when we’ve all become such desk-dwelling data junkies.