What we’re all about

Tweetwhatyoueat is a free Twitter-based food diary designed to answer the simple question, “What did you have to eat today?” Tweethwatyoueat is easiest food diary you’ll ever keep. Tweetwhatyoueat uses Twitter to allow you track your food intake, calories and weight from just about any device including your mobile phone, IM or the web!

Who’s behind it, and where did the idea come from?

Tweetwhatyoueat was designed and developed by Alex Ressi (aressidi) during the summer of 2007 as a simple means of tracking his eating habits for his upcoming wedding. After a successful “alpha” (defined by his seven-pound weight loss through the use of his new tracking tool) Ressi decided to polish up Tweetwhatyoueat and launch it for public use. On January 14th, 2008 www.tweetwhatyoueat.com launched as the first Twitter-based food diary, and possibly the first truly valuable Twitter app (those are not our words).

The very next day, Mr. Ressi contacted Lifehacker about the new site, and on day two of operation, Tweetwhatyoueat was featured on the homepage of Lifehacker. Mr. Ressi would learn a very valuable lesson that day about the need for quality hosting but would also pick up his first 500 users, many of whom are still active today.

Since the launch of Tweetwhatyoueat in January 2008, numerous improvements have been made to the service including the development and launch of the internet’s first crowd-sourced calorie database called CrowdCal. CrowdCal enables Tweetwhatyoueat to auto-fill un-caloried entries in user’s food diary with calorie values submitted by other members of Tweetwhatyoueat community. You can learn about how the CrowdCal database works here.

Other members of the family - Tweetwhatyouspend

Tweetwhatyoueat was the first in a series of socially responsible web-apps developed by Alex Ressi to help users track and improve critical areas of their life such as diet, and spending. If you’re interested in finding the answer to the question, “what happens to my money between trips to the ATM?” then check out Tweetwhatyoueat’s sister site www.tweetwhatyouspend.

How it was built and how you can help

Tweetwhatyoueat is self-funded and was developed using the Ruby on Rails framework. If you are a talented Ruby developer, designer, web guru, marketer, or product developer who would like to contribute to the project, drop us a line!

Opportunities

Contact us about advertising opportunities and the possibility of using the Tweetwhatyoueat/Tweetwhatyouspend platform for your company’s Twitter-based initiatives.