So i’ve introduced my sister to beeminding 
and i’d like to follow her progress. I’ve found the “supporters” feature, but that is only for emergency e-mails.
It would be nice to also be able to see it in my own goals page, after my own goals. Thoughts?
I like the idea of being able to follow others’ goals but probably on separate page from my goals. My goals page is getting increasingly cluttered. I also wouldn’t want their Beemergencies to distract me from my own.
A possible work around for your situation:
In your advanced settings you have the option to fill in an ‘About Me’ field and a url. If you aren’t already using it, you could put a link to your sister’s goal page in the url field so you can easily pop on over after checking your own goals. The link shows up to the side of your goals page.
I’m not entirely certain why setting an About Me and URL are under Advanced Settings, but it’s true. I confess that I didn’t know they were there; I’ve now set mine. Thanks @peppertoni!
You can also include URLs in the fine print of a goal. So if you have your own goal to periodically check on other people’s goal progress, that’s a good place to put links to their galleries.
We’ve occasionally discussed creating an overall, system-generated, ‘meta’ goal for each user, which might be the most interesting thing to monitor, rather than the individual goals.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve got enough goals of my own without adding someone else’s goals into my gallery. Not least because I don’t need the psychological stress of seeing their red graphs alongside my own. (Admittedly you said “after my own goals” rather than mixed in, but I’ve trained myself to react to the red graph of emergency days, and having red goals that I shouldn’t panic over seems dangerous.)
PS: I love it when people introduce others to beeminding; I think it’s the best way (right now) for someone to clamber up the learning curve and avoid some of the pitfalls. Thanks @apolyton for implicitly bringing up that topic: What’s the best way to introduce a friend to Beeminder?
We actually have this feature internally, in a kludgey way, and not exposed in the UI yet. It’s how @bee and I have some goals of user @meta’s in our own galleries (bmndr.com/d and bmndr.com/b). We’ve talked about a related idea – group goals – and I agree that first we should expose this “add other people’s goals to your gallery” feature.
The more people click the little heart on @apolyton’s suggestion the sooner we’ll do it!
PS: Slight correction: the Supporters feature only CCs the supporters on legit checks, not beemergencies. (The latter is common request but it will need to be opt-in, I think, since for many of us every day is a beemergency and that would be too spammy for supporters.)
This could be done without too much clutter if there were some visual seperation line between your goals and the people you are following, rather than having the goals mixed.
That said, personally I am a bit too embarrassed to be using beeminder to get people I know in real life to sign up.
Ooh, what do you think of this counterpoint: The Type Bee Personality (especially the section “Embarrassed To Be Minded?”)
This seems qualitatively different than just having a publicly linkable goal page, so I’m sure there’ll be some debate about how to properly implement it.
I think I’d want to have some kind of a relationship with the person whose gallery my goal appears in. Like ‘supporters’, this seems as though it ought to be configured from the goal. Conversely, it’d be weird if you could arbitrarily inject one of your graphs into my gallery, so a users I trust setting on my side. Certainly it should be configured goal-by-goal, not a blanket inclusion. The right controls would also make it possible (modulo under-the-hood pain) to share private goals.
Group goals sounds more interesting to me than getting other people’s goals in my gallery — after all, I can click on their gallery URL today to see how they’re getting on.
Group goals would be unbelievable awesome, although I fear that it would turn up the risk that people would add fake datapoints too much.
There are people I care deeply about, who have struggled to stop smoking - you can’t really use beeminder for that since smoking already implies that you don’t care too much about your own money - and I wouldn’t mind the risk of losing a couple hundred dollars in derailment fees to keep them around longer, but at the same time the I know they wouldn’t want to cost me money.
Heck it would even be a win-win-win thing because you would end up getting more users - your growth rate would be O(n^x) rather than O(n), I would be happy because I get to keep the people I care about around me longer, they would be alive longer.
So yeah, please make this possible.
I would love it if down the bottom of my goals, in the back burner section I could see goals I’ve “subscribed to” like my friends writing or weight goals.
@NickWolf click my little heart 