As I was thinking about the possibilities of Twitter, I was wondering how Twitter could be used as a Social Health application. PF Anderson created a great slideshow that incorporates a large number of possible usages related to Health:
This made me think more about using Twitter as a tool for people with chronic conditions to stay in touch with each other and keep updated about each other's status. This past year, I was reviewing TheStatus , which is a free service that enables its users to create a private patient page (password-protected) that they share with their friends to keep them up to date about their condition, with both pictures and comments. Using Twitter for Social Health would be the Web 2.0 version of TheStatus, where privacy issues are less important and updates can be made much more simpler and easier, since the update process can be done via text messaging rather than through a web-only interface.
Another service that came up recently is Plurk, which is a more visual Twitter clone that offers a couple of additional features like moods. Sites like DailyStrenght incorporate the idea of moods into their profiles as well, and have been quite successful with it. Personally, privacy issues are not that relevant for me, but I can understand how they could be when people are revealing status updates about their health. A private version of Twitter for health might be more successful. Instead of asking people "what are you doing", a small modification could make Twittter a great tool for sharing health updates with your friends online: "How are you doing?"
