Back in May 2010, I posted a quick teaser about a Facebook fitness app I was building. I couldn’t name the client back then. They wanted to remain anonymous until after we launched the app in August 2010.
It’s been fifteen years. I think the statute of limitations on that NDA is up.
The client was the American Cancer Society. Specifically, their DetermiNation program—an athletic charity training program that helps people run marathons and raise money to fight cancer.
I recently found the original spec sheets and some launch emails in my backups. Here’s what it was like building a social app inside Facebook back in 2010.
Social Fitness Before Strava
Long before Strava was a thing, we wanted to build a social fitness tracker directly inside Facebook. We wanted to help DetermiNation athletes log their runs, swims, and rides, and use their social network to raise money.
The feature list looks pretty standard now, but in 2010 it felt brand new:
- Logging workouts: Storing dates, distances, and times for running, walking, swimming, and cycling.
- Challenges: Setting up group contests with friends (top distance, endurance, half-ironman, relay races).
- “Cheers” and “Taunts”: Built-in social prompts that posted messages directly to your friends’ Facebook walls.
- Badges: Earning awards for hitting milestones or cheering friends.
Under the Hood: Building for 760 Pixels
Building for Facebook in 2010 was a moving target. Facebook was changing everything, constantly. We had to build layouts that loaded inside their interface using iframes or FBML (Facebook Markup Language).
According to our final spec doc—which I found drafted by Mark Horoszowski at Cymbal Interactive—we targeted about 5,000 active users. We had some wild layout constraints:
- The 760px Canvas: The main app canvas page could only be exactly 760 pixels wide. If you went wider, it broke.
- The 200px Profile Box: We had to build a tiny widget (200 pixels wide, 8-pixel padding) that sat directly on a user’s Facebook Profile tab so they could show off their challenge standings.
- SMTP Relays: Email notifications kept the loop going. We had to configure a dedicated SMTP relay just to send emails when someone cheered you or challenged you.
What I Learned
This app was an early lesson for me in social gamification. Working with the team at Cymbal Interactive and the American Cancer Society (shout out to Kyle Harris and Jon Loomer) showed me how small social nudges could motivate people to train harder and raise more money.
It’s wild to look back at a 2010 spec sheet and realize that collaborative challenges, social cheering, and feed sharing are the exact same mechanics powering today’s fitness giants.
We ran the app for about a year. My last email notification from the live app was in May 2011.
It was a fun era of building.
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