I would like to add my voice to those who are expressing discontent with the Coolrunning.com->Active transition.

I have been a user of the coolrunning.com service since 2000, though I only really started to use the service in late 2002. I liked cool running's easy to use interface, and the fact that it took just two or three clicks to get to useful information.

However, in the past year or so, even with the ease of use, I was beginning to privately express some dissatisfaction with the service. My issues with the service doesn't lie with its any speed issues, merely that over the past year or so, the interface was starting to look rather dated and very late nineties. So I began looking for a new site. Here were my criterion for a new site:

• Must be able to handle the following information:

Time, Distance, Date, Time of Day, Type of Workout, Type of Exercise(running or xtraining), searchable routes, weight,weather, PRs, heart rate, comment field. Searchable race/workout results within own log, and the ability to export data to a tab delimited text file.

• Would be nice to have, but not key:

Effort field, Race placement fields, hours of sleep field, general health comment field w/ icons for sick days, etc, route mapping, and the ability to import data.

• Modern looking interface with web 2.0 feel (sharable logs, tagging of workouts and results), interesting graphics, and an interface to create a bug to place on your homepage/facebook/myspace/forum signature.

• Interface MUST BE SIMPLE yet intuitive. No one wants to be going through three pages just to enter a log, and every page must be no more than two or three clicks from the user's Summary page. Being able to use keystrokes (like tab and arrows) as well as the mouse to manipulate the interface is important to me. Don't force me to enter any fields at all, if I want to have a blank entry, so be it.

I tried the Runner's World Logs, Running Ahead.com, Nike's running logs, the Active lots, a little site called Buckeye Outdoors, and of course, cool running.
With those four sets of requirements, Cool Running met more of the requirements than any other site. It didn't have the modern look and feel that other sites have, but it made up for it with it's simple and intuitive interface, and thats important to me. Up until the Transition, I was using Nikerunning.com (the version without the Nike+iPod interface), coolrunning, and Buckeye Outdoors full-time). Coolrunning had a simple interface, all of the fields I was ever going to need, and the ability to export your data to back it up to your hard drive is very important, Nike Running.com has the shiny graphics, and Buckeye outdoors has the ability to export bugs to your homepage (though he hasn't gotten to the other parts yet).

By far, the Active logs have the worst interface design, just because of the sheer inconvenience of having to go through 3 pages just to enter a daily log entry, and not having enough interesting fields for data entry. There are also a lot of little things that I don't like about the interface right now, the way shoes are handled (you can't retire old shoes?), no editing a finished workout, no fields for time of run, a non-intuitive way to graph months/weekly time period, etc. Heck, I have to navigate 4 pages from my login page JUST to FIND it, unless I bookmark it.

Don't get me started on the lost data during the transition. I shouldn't have to ask to have it restored, it should just be there.

I didn't like Running Ahead because the interface wasn't quite as intuitive as cool running, but with the death of the coolrunning interface, I'm abandoning my log here and moving on. It's obvious that this interface is MAYBE a beta interface, if that, and you guys have a long way to go, despite your back end problems, I'm surprised that you couldn't just migrate the back end to a different, more solid and hefty db format and to something heftier, and then keep the old interface until the new one is ready.

I hope you guys take my advice to heart and include some of these features in your finished product. I think with other competitive brands out there, just because Active.com has a large market share in race coordination and registrations doesn't mean that people will gravitate here for everything. They go where the best product is, and right now, this is not the best running online-log product. The good thing for you guys is that there also isn't an AMAZING product out there, either, so the window of opportunity is still there for me. Come up with a great product, and I'll come a-running.

And if anyone else knows of a log who does more of these cool features than anything I listed, let me know! I think a good Web 2.0 style running log would be a really cool thing, there are some really nifty concepts that have been introduced recently that would be GREAT for a running log.