Want to Team Up?

Online learning can be difficult to accomplish alone, especially with a full-time job or other obligations, like children. Fortunately, the Internet also comes with about a bajillion websites, some of which provide a method to team up with people who have the same interests as you do. Here is a summary of some of the sites I’ve used over the years to help me become motivated and keep me on the right track.

43 Things

43 Things is a service that provides users with the ability to set goals, share them, speak with others, ask questions, give advice, and much more for just about anything (If the goal doesn’t exist, just create it yourself).

I find most of the advice is relatively solid compared to, say, Yahoo! Answers and the people are generally willing to help out with serious goals. Give it a try and be sure to let yourself adjust to the interface before making any decisions (It’s not the most intuitive website).

Comotivate

Comotivate is a service similar to 43 Things, but with much greater focus on specifically partnering with a handful of people. The site’s matching features aren’t the best, and there are some bugs and improvements to be fixed and added, but the general concept is spot-on and the implementation is fairly solid.

The site can be slow at times, which is unfortunate. I would keep checking back in the future to see if it improves at all.

I Want to Speak

Instead of trying to be everything, I Want to Speak focuses on languages and learning them. Similar to Comotivate, I Want to Speak matches you with a partner based on what languages you both speak and want to learn to speak. I signed up for the site around a year ago, but I never really used it much due to a lot of slowness and a clunky interface due to a half-baked JavaScript implementation. It may have improved by now, but I still tend to avoid it.

SparkPeople

If weight loss is your thing, SparkPeople is where you can get the best buddy system I’ve found online. With matching by area, interest, or goal, specific groups which provide an expanded matching system, plenty of motivating articles, exercise tips and guides, and recipes, SparkPeople really was the ultimate tool for weight loss. It does not focus solely on losing weight or getting fit, but rather changing the way members think about things and making them live healthier lives overall.

I have used the above communities somewhat, especially the first and last, and have found them more useful than others I have tried. There are plenty more out there, so I want to hear from you: what am I missing?

If a stand-alone goal tracker is more your thing, try out Joe’s Goals.