Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 9 years and 3 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Everyone seems to have a fitness tracker these days. They’re the hot new personal tech.

I pre-ordered the original FitBit back in 2008 but ended up cancelling my order once they shipped (over a year and a half later) because at the time I had met my weight loss goals and decided I didn’t need one. Four years later I got my wife the FitBit One and ended up with one (no pun intended) myself in January last year. I really took to it, just for basic step counting and weight tracking, even calling it “generating system/debug logs for my body” in an e-mail I sent to the Daily Tech News Show (see the clip below, starting at 28:04):

My wife now has the Flex and my daughter got a Charge for Christmas, so my family is a FitBit family. We all use the FitBit app on our iPhones, compete against each other in step counts, etc. It’s actually a fun “family” activity. I particularly like the Charge because a) I finally got my daughter to wear a “watch” and b) it’s paired to her phone so when I call her my name appears on her wrist and it vibrates so I know she’ll see me calling. 🙂

Oh, Happy New Year by the way!