One of the most visible recent examples of over-sharing was Josh Harris’s movie, We Live in Public, where he taped every minute of his life for six months and turned it into a movie to show “the price we pay for living in public.” While this example is well-known and has been seen by people all over the world, there are certainly many other examples on a smaller, local scale. Right here in Portland, a friend of mine works in a building where The Public Isolation Project has just been kicked off. The plan is for Cristin Norine to spend a month living in an isolated glass room visible to anyone passing by on the busy street, but without any non-digital human contact. All of her interactions with people will occur solely online or through glass walls.

Both of these examples are way beyond anything that I would ever consider doing, but I am constantly faced with choices and trade-offs: am I sharing things that other people really would find useful, or am I sharing too much? For example, my favorite running app, RunKeeper, introduced the RunKeeper Live feature where other people can track my runs in real-time to see where I am running right this second. While this would be really useful if I was ever injured while running, I don’t think that I want any random person to know exactly where I am every second of my run. However, the company also introduced live tracking for races where people can see where you are on the course and watch your progress toward completing that big race, which might be something that I would consider. I can see my family and friends being interested in following my live progress on a run when they are too far away to attend in-person.

What about those gray areas: information that you want to share even if only a few people will find it interesting. Does anyone really care what I had for lunch? What if I made a really amazing lunch, and I posted what was in it to give people ideas and inspiration for something they might want to make? I also sometimes share details about my workouts, which probably aren’t that interesting to many people, other than a few runner friends, but it gives us an excuse to motivate each other. What about fun posts that make people laugh, or commiserate about a bad day? Most of us probably share bits and pieces of information that falls into one of these categories, but how much is too much sharing?

Sharing details about the work that we do online is usually OK, as long as we’re careful not to disclose anything confidential about our company or clients. I try to share things that I think will be useful for other people. In my work as a community manager, I document and share processes and information that members of our online community might need. On a more general note, I blog about community manager tips on my personal blog, write posts of interest to web workers here and occasionally share other information as videos or guest posts.

I often feel obligated to share the personal rationale behind my decisions to help people understand my choices. I’ve blogged about stepping down from a non-profit that I helped co-found, starting new jobs, leaving old jobs and other actions that people might notice. Each of us now has a platform to tell our side of the story or to provide personal insights in a way that didn’t exist for most of us until relatively recently. The hard part is deciding which parts to share and which to keep to ourselves.

What are some examples you’ve seen of people sharing too much? Where do you draw the line between public and private?

Photo by Flickr user Ben Grey used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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This week, I’ve been playing with the RunKeeper iPhone app to track my workouts. I wanted to play with something different to track my runs, and some friends have been using RunKeeper, so I thought that I would give it a try. RunKeeper has been around for a while, so it is only new to me, but I like it way better than I thought I would.

I really like the RunKeeper approach. You hit a single button to start your workout and another to stop the workout, and when you press stop, you have the option to save or discard. Saved workouts are automatically sent to your RunKeeper account, where you can log in to view all of the details from your workout in a web interface with maps and a variety of statistics about your workout.

RunKeeper tracks all of the important aspects of my running workouts:

• Start time, end time and duration to keep track of how long I’ve been working out, to help me identify any differences in my performance based on the time of the day that I did my run.
• Distance, pace and speed help me make sure that I’m going a little further every day to build my running endurance (one of my personal workout goals).
• Climbed (altitude) is particularly important for me, since most of my workouts include a fair amount of elevation gain, and the altitude gain of my workout is going to impact speed.
• Calories burned is calculated based on your body weight and distance; however, it also seems to factor in speed, since I did two nearly identical distance workouts, but one was 10 minutes shorter with more calories burned. It shows that they are doing something more sophisticated with their calorie calculations than a simple distance and body weight computation, which I thought was a nice touch.

I also like being able to edit my route for those times when you lose your GPS connection, or when you are making turns more quickly than the GPS sampling can accurately record. I edited my route for one of my workouts when it looked like I was short cutting through people’s yards, instead of staying on the sidewalk. It was fairly easy to drag the route back into place, which triggered a recalculation of distance.

The privacy features are fairly robust with several options for how you can choose to share your workouts or keep them private. You can choose to automatically make your routes and runs public and share them over Twitter and Facebook. You can also decide not to automatically share everything, and just share individual activities on an ad hoc basis. The option that I’ve selected is to keep everything private.

My one big complaint with RunKeeper is that when I registered, it emailed my password to me in clear text. This is a rookie web application mistake that should be fixed as soon as possible by moving to commonly accepted password best practices, like encrypting passwords for starters.

Despite this one major faux pas, I’m a huge fan of RunKeeper. I’m also using it in conjunction with DailyBurn, which helps me keep track of all of my workouts (weights, gym cardio, outdoor running, etc.) I plan to keep using RunKeeper, at least until I get distracted by the next shiny iPhone fitness application.

RunKeeper is available in two flavors. RunKeeper Free is ad-supported, while RunKeeper Pro costs $9.99 and has audio cues (you can hear your stats via your headphones) and training workouts (hear time-based or distance-based interval workouts through your headphones).

How do you keep track of your workouts and stay motivated to keep fit?

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