We have a pretty overwhelming list of them at beeminder.consider.it. Here are some thoughts from @shanaqui based on user feedback:
We’ve had some really great gains in the past from partnering up with the right integration partner at the right time (Focusmate was a biggie). Here are some factors we’ve identified for what makes an autodata integration especially great:
Similar goals (beating akrasia, providing accountability)
Mutual partnership where we promote each other
Timeliness (right around the new year when people were making new resolutions)
Nicky continues:
I’m not sure that’s helped me identify anything from our existing feedback (actually, it amused me to spot that we only have 4 votes for Focusmate before launching it!), but I thought I’d share in case that lights a fire in anyone’s brain like “waaait, XYZ is a startup with an audience, we could integrate with their stuff easily, and we could get it done by the end of December”.
The frontrunners in the feedback for wanting an integration are Anki and Forest. Also a fair number of general requests for a meditation app – Headspace is the one that people often use alongside Apple Health reporting it to Beeminder, and that can be unreliable because of the Apple Health sync issues, so if they have an API it might be a good choice for a future integration. Because there’s a workaround via Apple Health, people haven’t specifically requested it very often, but if we were to try and expand the sort of stuff we track, it could be an interesting choice. Meditation is such a common Beeminder goal (and I personally liked Headspace a lot). MyFitnessPal is requested less these days, but is high in the votes as well.
In conclusion, we thought we’d put the question to you all: do you know anything that meets these criteria that you’d love to beemind?
It’s not a meditation app, but the kanji learning site, Wanikani, seems to have an easily accessible API available. For folks learning Japanese Kanji, completing a number of lessons/reviews everyday for 1-3 years is the best way to progress, so using Beeminder is a great way to stay on track. I have had a manual Do More goal for a long time and would love this to be automated.
The site also has a very busy forum where WK could be promoted (I would certainly do so).
I think before we make it dramatically easier for users to create integrations, we need to improve our reporting.
If we don’t expose what we’re calling, when we’re calling it, how long it took, what the response was, and how that affected the datapoints, I worry we’d be setting ourselves up for a massive amount of support–but if we had those things exposed, it’d be much easier for folks to “self-service”. I worry that without more of these details available, it could be more support per integration, not less!
(It would also be awesome if we exposed that information for first-party integrations. Our newer integrations are moving in that direction, so when the UX is ready, we’ve got things to put in it.)
If folks want to make it even easier for their favorite integration, finding/suggesting these details may help:
linking to the API authentication details
suggesting a good default metric, “number of lessons”, “number of games”, “total score”
is the same metric we would be putting on the graph or in each datapoint something the user can see using the third-party thing? (For instance, if we are going to graph the total number of lessons, is there a place where you can see your total number of lessons on the other site/app/Experience™?) If not, this isn’t a dealbreaker but it does help with reducing our support load per integration.
(I have a seriously Long list of integration/metric questions but I don’t want to be too scary )
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