Wellsphere brings its 4 million or so monthly unique visitors to the table. The site also has 300,000 health‐related articles, over 250,000 health‐related images, and nearly  20,000 health and healthy living videos.

The size of the deal is not being disclosed. Wellsphere has raised $3 million in funding from Gemini Israel Funds and Woodrow Myers. HealthCentral has raised a whopping $50 million in capital from Sequoia Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, IAC and Carlyle Group.

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Even if you do have December 26 off, with January 1 around the corner it’s time for resolutions about getting fit and healthy. Here’s a few sites we’ve reviewed that will help you along the way.

Fat Secret
(review: April 2007)

Fat Secret is designed to help overweight people leverage a network of friends and online resources to lose weight by building a support network around you to monitor your progress.

Users first state their current and goal weights, and are urged to report in daily with their updated weight. This data builds a graph that is included on their profile page showing progress over time. Each user is also provided with a blog/journal and can add other Fatsecret users as friends.

DietTV
(previously Diet Television: review November 2006)

The site is a directory of diet plans that combines user ratings and professional nutritionist analysis of various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption. The company says it is based on two ideas: that dieting is hard and that community is one of the biggest factors in successful weight loss. There was information available on 47 different diets when we first reviewed the site. To search for a diet, users move 12 sliders to indicate which diet and food factors are most important to them. The site recommends which ones could best fit their needs. Users can also contribute off-site links related to any diet.

Traineo
(review December 2006)

Traineo is a health and fitness support site where users report their weight, diet, and exercise daily to a group of friends who help monitor and support one another….Instead of inputting how many ounces of cheese you ate in your burrito, and how much cream you put in your coffee, Traineo allows you to just give an estimation of how you think you ate each day. Based on your age, weight, and goal, it tells you how many calories you should aim for and, at the end of the day, you tell the program if you ate poor, average, fair, or great.

If you’ve spent Christmas alone, or you need some more rounded/ broader help, here’s a few sites that may help as well:

Wellsphere
(review January 2007)

Wellsphere is concerned with day-to-day sorts of health choices that make up “wellness”, the kind you don’t ask your doctor, but consult your peers about. Wellsphere is meant to help people with these choices and motivation by providing users with access to similar people and to health-related resources in their area. These resources are split between personal profiles and databases of health-related locations they’ve put together.

DailyStrength
(review November 2006)
A social network that provides a space for people with a wide variety of medical, psychological and life conditions to discuss their struggles and the treatments they are undergoing.

The highlight of DailyStrength is that users are asked to describe medical and psychological treatments they have undergone. They indicate what conditions those treatments were for, whether they were effective and provide a narrative about the experience. That information is then aggregated by condition and treatment – so it’s easy to see what a large number of people have done in response to a condition or what it’s really like to undergo a certain treatment.

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BeWell@Stanford is powered by Wellsphere and offers a central place where members can get personalized advice, discover wellness resources and activities available on and near campus, meet like-minded people, and form groups for support, advice and encouragement.

Eric Stein, senior associate athletic director at Stanford University said that the site was about creating “a healthier Stanford.”

Once signing up, users can immediately begin joining groups based on activities, interests, or shared goals. Members can post notes on their progress, get advice, and support from experts and peers, watch and share streaming videos, send compliments to each other, and invite friends and family to participate. Just in case late nights plotting a new world changing startup gets in the way, each member receives personalized updates telling them to go outside and exercise more than their fingers at a keyboard.

Users will also has access Wellsphere’s directory of local healthy living resources in nearby Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City and surrounding areas, and the option to interact with people in the greater Wellsphere community.

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Their personal profiles are much like any social networking site with the addition of a blog like feature called a “Wellsphere”. Wellspheres are comment threads attached to your profile dealing with a goal you want to accomplish or some specific knowledge you have about being healthy. Any registered user can subscribe to updates on the sphere or add to the conversation by posting their own input. You can imagine there being a lot of duplicate discussions, which Wellsphere deals with by allowing members to vote for other users by “endorsing” them.

Instead of purely making friends, like on social networking sites, Wellsphere has “activity partners”. The hope is that people are more likely to keep up their fitness goals if they schedule activities as part of a group of people who depend on them to show up, and I agree. However, while the search function lets you find people in your area with similar interests, activity planning is left up to members. It seems like a MatchActivity-like solution, matching up people training for a marathon, or weight training once a week would be an ideal addition. EmilyR seems like a perfect candidate for this, considering she’s already looking for a running partner.

The final part of the site is the databases for health related places like gyms and therapists, as well as healthy restaurant suggestions. You can search the databases by location, to look for gyms or maybe a chiropractor in your area. It even looks like you can filter your search by what kind of music the gym plays. The databases link up with the rest of the site by including what listing what members go there, making it easier to find workout buddies in your area.

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