A few weeks ago I interviewed the founder of HealthUnlocked.  HealthUnlocked are an online community for patients looking for support and advice on their health related issues.

They form part of a growing band of sites that are launching to allow people to talk to other people about their conditions and symptoms.

I was reading an interesting paper earlier today, and embedded below, that looks at this growing trend, and in particular on the large amount of data these sites are harvesting about us and our healthcare.

The paper was written by Deborah Lupton from Sydney University.  She looks into whether healthcare will inevitably follow the model used by other industries that have used the data we have provided to social networks to market products to us effectively.

That’s certainly the belief of Lupton, and her article raises questions over whether that commercialisation is appropriate or not.

I’m not sure I agree with her conclusion, but it’s certainly an interesting read.

The idea that too much choice can be bad for making good decisions is not a new one.  It has achieved widespread acceptance as part of Braess’ Paradox, which stated that adding extra roads can worsen congestion, whilst removing them can ease traffic flow.

It’s a process that has been proven in a number of cities.  Does it apply to social networks though?  A new paper from the University of Amsterdam has set out to investigate how extra choices can produce poorer results within a social network.

As previously said though, whilst interesting, this is not a new concept.  Below is an interesting TED talk from Barry Schwartz from back in 2005.

The Bike Radar cycling forum I frequent has a fascinating thread whereby a member asked for, and then proceeded to ignore, countless pages of dietary advice.  The online car crash is regularly interspersed with photos of the original poster stood on scales and sharing images of the bad food he’s just bought sat on his car seat. As the thread is approaching...