First, congratulations to Daily Strength as the site looks great and there is some nice activity already taking place. In our mind, the more great minds and entrepreneurs we all can get focused on solving real problems like health, the better. It’s really nice to see that entrepreneurs are innovating in sectors as important as health - this sector has been remarkably unchanged for years. And it seems most of the applications we read about everyday on TC, and many of the companies launching, are about whiz-bang tools or gadgets, and it’s not always clear what societal need is being resolved. But I digress…

The real magic happens when communities/new businesses. etc. start to leverage these same technologies and tools to help people solve real life challenges in new/better/more efficient ways. And that’s what the whole new crop of social networks, 2.0 sites, etc. are finally doing - but in health. It is going to be exciting to see new communities like sermo.com, daily strength, organizedwisdom.com, eons.com, and the many others that have recently launched evolve and mature. As these business keep improving, we’re all going to benefit….

Shameless plug: Here’s our launch press release and we’d love your feedback as we continue to make improvements daily: http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/061003/106107.html

Techcrunch profiles a new social network site in the health niche. DailyStrength describes itself as: Most everyone has a serious personal challenge themselves or has someone close to them that does. DailyStrength is a collection of safe, anonymous, on…

One of the things that came up after we added blogs to Share was that all of a sudden the blog postings were getting picked up in Google searches. So if a member searched for their child’s name on Google and if they had used it in their blog, it showed up, often quite high. This really alarmed a lot of folks who don’t live their day to day lives online and haven’t experienced this before. After that a lot of people changed their logins to pseudonyms for themselves and their children and reconsidered how much to share in their profiles. (We also have the option of members not showing their profile details.) It is an ongoing education process. We have a section called “Share with Care” that helps highlight 10 practices for safely participating in online support communities.

In addition, every post is reviewed by staff to keep alert for abuse, people who might be in some danger and for incorrect medical advice (even though there are clear guidelines for NOT giving medical advice, but we all do it, eh?) For the most part, the culture of the community - and I would definitely call this a community, not a loser social network - is self moderating. It is a beautiful thing. But the community manager has to step in - usually when we have someone who is having mental health issues and the odd person who is just in to disrupt things. Note I said reviewed: not moderated. Posts go up in real time for confirmed (email confirm) members.

What is really interesting to explore here is how this scales out to the network level. What level of dilligence is required when we move away from the community level where people participate both as individuals but with a clear association to the community, some sense of responsibility to others? In a network, we can associate through information sharing, but we may not always do that in the context of relationships with those with whom we are sharing. It is a different sort of social and interaction model.

I think the privacy issue is a red herring as compared to the potential to benefit from all that can be learned from this kind of a site.

Great job by the team at Daily Strength. I think you will be a huge success.

Congrats on the launch from another old time Yahoo. Site looks pretty good.

Erik

However, there would be a swarming of quacks marketing placebos in such sites. How to stop them from causing damage?

It is incomprehensible to me that the site only gives users five choices when rating a treatment. from “not working” to “somewhat helpful” to “working.”

If you had any major illness, especially a psychiatric one, you know that a simple rating like this can’t convey an experience with a medication even on the most superficial level.

On top of that, 170 character cap on the “describe your experience” section doesn’t exactly encourage users to share many details on how the treatment has worked out for them.

This doesn’t put a rosy light on DailyStrength’s future when RemedyFind, a long established competitor site (sans the web 2.0/social networking hoohaas), allows users to rate a treatment on five axes and specify duration of the treatment, dosage, and formation; plus, there is no cap on number of characters in free-form review section.