Butterball
http://www.butterball.com/
Butterball? Frozen turkeys and lunchmeats Butterball? It may seem an unlikely Web 2.0 site, but the Butterball company has its drumsticks firmly planted in the digital age. Back in 1981, Butterball launched what could be considered an early attempt at social networking, the Turkey Talk-Line. The Turkey Talk-Line is a toll-free number anyone can call to get expert advice on preparing Thanksgiving meals. From modest beginnings the service has grown to help an estimated 100,000 people annually fix their turkey troubles. This year, the company announced the arrival of the next-generation Turkey Talk-Line.
In addition to standard Web 2.0 fare like how-to videos, the company now offers services like texting, live chat and blogs. With Turkey Texts, users can text the word "turkey" to 36888 and start receiving turkey tips on the go. On the 25th, users can also go to Butterball's Web site and join a live Web chat to get questions answered in real time. Also debuting this year are the Butterball Bloggers -- a team of experts sharing their culinary guidelines and answering e-mails.
As in the past, all turkey queries Butterball receives online or on the phone are answered by professionally trained chefs, dieticians and nutritionists.
www.gyminee.com/
Gyminee might prove itself useful if you find that, after this week, you've become something of a butterball yourself. Gyminee bills itself as the premier social network focused exclusively on fitness. The site offers a host of exercise options you can, um, exercise to help you get and stay fit.
GymBuddies are available to give users the option of joining up with an accountability partner to help both users stay on their fitness tracks. Fitness groups, meanwhile, are available for people with similar goals and challenges to meet and exchange ideas.
The site also offers numerous exercise videos with instructions on how to do the exercise correctly. Once you've learned how to do the exercises, you can use Gyminee to formulate a workout plan and track your efforts by entering data such as weight, distance, heart rate and number of sets and repetitions.
For iPhone users, Gyminee has an application available for your phone that can help you attain your fitness goals while you're on the move. You can access your workout routine, track your progress and even access a nutritional information database complete with nutrition labels -- which is also available on the Gyminee site for those of us sans iPhone.
For even more help staying on target, Gyminee sets up challenges for its users. The challenges can be based around anything fitness related -- from most calories burned to most miles biked.
One other fat-fighting feature Gyminee offers is the person profile. Though it's up to the user to add complete data (and to be honest), the site charts a graph showing progress and keeps users up-to-date with their GymBuddies, workout routines, challenges entered and fitness groups joined.
