I have forwarded this feature request (along with 'orienteering' as an activity) to garminconnect twitter account which seems to be read by Garmin (at least they answer there).
Garmin, why haven't you added a friends list yet? Garmin Connect has come so far over the years, but it's still missing a really important/highly requested feature! Garmin Connect really needs an easy way to keep up with your friends workouts/exercising. The workarounds are way too cumbersome. PLEASE add a quick way to check on your friend's activity (even if it's just the public activity).
Come on Garmin get it together. I currently run Connect, Runkeeper and MapmyRun purely because you don't have a proper social connect function. The new friends function is lame what’s the go with that emailing files. It's like you don't even have an IT department and all your "innovation" is driven by accountants not innovative developers. I bet there’s a department of frustrated developers and innovators somewhere in Garmin wondering what they need to do to get you corporates to open your eyes. Garmin could be the Apple of the fitness world if they just spent some money on what their clients want. And you have the info right in front of you.:p
I agree with what's been written, the ability to add friends would be fantastic. I have maybe 10 people in the same area as me logging activities but I've never bumped into them or spoken to them!
Would be nice to have friends in categories such as Runners / Bikers etc
Ability to send private messages to one another would also be a bonus..
Come on Garmin get it together. I currently run Connect, Runkeeper and MapmyRun purely because you don't have a proper social connect function.
The new friends function is lame what’s the go with that emailing files. It's like you don't even have an IT department and all your "innovation" is driven by accountants not innovative developers.
I bet there’s a department of frustrated developers and innovators somewhere in Garmin wondering what they need to do to get you corporates to open your eyes. Garmin could be the Apple of the fitness world if they just spent some money on what their clients want. And you have the info right in front of you.:p
+1. Adding a related table to the user table which contains a list of friend id's in the backend database is not that tough to do. Then write a stored procedure which retrieves the last X recent activities from my friends, tie that to a new display page on Connect which aggregates the results into a news-feed type display, and voila, Connect is MUCH more social. Now you have a new feature to tout at trade shows and on your website, etc. People want to interact with their friends with similar interests. A runner with a Garmin shows this to a runner without a Garmin, and you have yourself a new customer going out to buy your hardware. A more social Garmin Connect will drive purchases. I can see from checking out the Connect page source that you are using RichFaces, you have a good frontend UI, are using some web services and some current Javascript libraries like prototype and scriptaculous, so I know you have some good developers hidden around Garmin corporate somewhere. It would be a big win all around if you threw a few developer resources into this. It is almost dumb not to, as you are already paying them, and the ROI for a feature like this as opposed to whatever they are doing right now, has got to be much higher. And you dev's reading this, come on guys, tell management how cool this would be! While yeah it will take some work, it's work that is going to pay off. Sell it to your boss!
This would be a total no brainer for me. I do not want a major social when it comes to my training but I do enjoy the competition and encouragement I can get from having a bunch of similarly minded friends and family to connect with. I would happily ditch my allegiance with runkeeper but the street team keeps me in there. I'm starting to look elsewhere but frankly I want the one-stop-shop where I have amazing training data (as garmin connect provides) and that limited element of a social / competitive scene.
I found it a bit strange (I've just recently got a 910xt) that the site was called garmin connect but you can't actually connect to anyone. Maybe having a better team element would actually encourage others who don't have garmins to get one - and then there's the return on further investing in the site rather than encouraging others to look elsewhere and using their phones for fitness tracking.
