Social media nudges are popping up to help people keep their promises for 2010.
1) A site that lets you build an entire web page around a single goal and offers resources for helping achieve it.
2) Called “The New Year’s Nudge,” this facebook app posts your resolution on friends’ walls so they can keep you honest.
3) For those who want to live by a budget in 2010, a social media site that publishes the purchase history of your credit cards to friends — and even strangers, if you like.
In the A Dozen Nudges chapter, Nudge highlights private companies that have adopted incentive-based health plans that reward people for exercising and quitting smoking. In the U.S., one state has decided to tax unhealthy residents. Now legislators from Alberta, Canada, may be the first to give people a tax credit–$500–for exercising.
(O)rganized sports requiring “sustained, prolonged activity” likely will be eligible for the credit, including hockey, soccer and skiing, along with organized running and hiking clubs.
Hat tip: Justin McDonald
If so, try having more fun in 2010, says John Tierney.
People who have moved to Chicago, Dallas and London get to fewer local landmarks during their entire first year than the typical tourist visits during a two-week stay, according to a study conducted by Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, who are professors of marketing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively.
The Chicagoans in the study had visited more landmarks in other cities than in their own, and even their relatively small amount of local sightseeing was done mainly in the course of entertaining out-of-towners. Otherwise, the only time Chicagoans rushed to see the local landmarks was just before they were about to move to another city, when that deadline inspired sudden passions for taking architectural tours and going to the zoo.
If you’re a Chicago resident, bundle up and get yourself down to Millennium Park soon.
Hat tip: Christopher Daggett, Philip Frankenfeld.
