on running afowl

I love dailymile. And that’s why I want to see it keep getting better. With all the talk recently about support for Garmin GPS devices, I was reminded of some of the ideas I’ve had for features I’d like to see implemented at some point.

1. More privacy options.
   This is something my wife mentioned on Run Talk Radio a little while back. When I was starting out, I was a little shy about sharing my miles. I really wanted greater granularity when it came to privacy. Ideally, I’d love to see options where posts can be made private, friends only, or public. At this point I’m not sure that I’d avoid posting publicly all that often, but the option would be nice.
2. Sanity checks.
   I’ve almost made the mistake myself: posting a 262-mile run instead of 26.2 miles, or missing a digit while entering my time. It would be nice if the site checked to make sure what you were entering makes sense. Not that I think dailymile should prevent you from posting something that seems extreme… I just think the site should prompt you to make sure you didn’t make a mistake. So, for example, a run over 150 miles or under 3 minutes/mile might trigger a sanity check, a simple dialog asking if you possibly made a typo. Similar appropriately gauged triggers for cycling, swimming, etc. could be implemented as well.
3. More options for challenges.
   I think that the challenges on dailymile have a lot of potential yet. Multi-sport challenges, group or team challenges, etc.
4. Better gear management.
   I love using dailymile to keep track of how many miles my shoes have on them (and how little rubber the soles have left), but I wish the feature was a little more developed. In particular, I’d love to hide gear without retiring it–I want to keep the info on my older shoes in dailymile, but I don’t want to always see those older shoes when posting runs. Also, stats about your gear seem a little hidden right now, it would be nice if they were available from the analytics page.
5. Exporting data.
   I’m not looking to leave, but being able to easily get my data into Excel, Numbers, or OpenOffice for custom graphs and charts would be pretty cool.

Those are just a few ideas I wanted to jot down. They’re only meant as a starting point for thinking about what dailymile can offer down the road–they are by no means a criticism. I’ve been loving the site since I joined, more and more each day, to be honest, and I’m excited to see what comes next… whether it’s Garmin-integration or something else entirely!