The start of a new year is a time of self-reflection and personal change, and MeYou Health aimed to offer people tools that could help make a New Year’s resolution social.

The first year, we created an app that helped people publicly pledge their resolutions. Titled My Resolution 2011, it would allow a user to enter his or her resolution, invite friends to share their own, and receive and offer support. The idea was to provide accountability for the person making the resolution and create a positive environment of encouragement and support.

In the second year, we created the New Year’s Anti-Resolution, an app designed to help people re-think what a resolution could – or should – be. It steered users away from setting large, vague health goals and instead encouraged them to focus on small, meaningful actions that can affect well-being. It provided examples of small actions, which were gathered from Daily Challenge.

My Resolution 2011 taught us an unexpected and valuable lesson: after thousands of people signed up in the first few hours, the virality attracted Facebook’s attention and the app was taken offline. We subsequently learned that a person or company who creates an app cannot rely on Facebook to rate-limit activities. The application has to rate-limit itself (and this was news to us, because the information was undocumented).

We applied this lesson to Daily Challenge, where we implemented a change that would “throttle” invites, or restrict the number of invites that any one person can create each day. When New Year’s Anti-Resolution was launched on New Year’s Day of 2012, it did not suffer from the same problem and instead enjoyed a good reception and positive press.

Try your hand at some small actions with Daily Challenge.