Is Fitango's Action Plan Market the future of training and education?

I'm writing fewer and fewer posts these days based on PR pitches. The folks here at ZDNet (and many other blogs and news networks) get calls and emails every day from PR people suggesting that we cover this or that service or development. Many times these pitches are closely related to things I cover anyway and are an easy source of news. Other times, not so much. But once in a while, I get a pitch that catches my eye because it's about something cool, unusual, or clearly different. So it was with Fitango.

Fitango uses content libraries and the social web to help people achieve goals. Not surprisingly, with a name like Fitango, many of the built-in goals currently relate to health and physical fitness. Want to lose weight, plant a garden, or quit smoking? There are so-called "actions plans" for all of them. Berlitz 5-minute language courses can get you closer to learning a language (just French for now), you can become a vegetarian, or you can work on potty-training your kid.

Some of these goals are free, others have some nominal price, and still others can be a bit pricey. The potty-training action plan? $4.99.

At first blush, some of the action plans can seem a bit frivolous. Perhaps they are. What interested me about Fitango, though, was the business model and the built-in motivational strategies. Fitango is the sort of social web application that just might be a game changer for training and education.

We've already seen that gamification can have an impact on something as urbane as Microsoft Office users embracing the new ribbon layout used in the last couple generations of Office (in fact, Microsoft has just updated its Ribbon Hero social gaming application). Fitanngo takes this a step further, allowing you act as a motivator within the application, work to complete action plans, or both. Facebook integration is a given and there is a reward system associated with the action plans.

You can also create your own plans, either with discrete steps or with a specific schedule, both of which are quite simple.

All of this functionality is free; Fitango makes its money by taking a share of the profits from action plans sold through their Planstore. The idea of a marketplace is nothing new on the web. eBay and Amazon have made sure that we're familiar with the idea. The company that's currently paying the bills for me has created an extensive network of teachers and learners who can buy and sell courseware and instructional services in a "learning marketplace." So a "Planstore" with action plans for sale, where a company shares revenue with "experts" who contributed the plans shouldn't seem that revolutionary.

But, like my own company's learning marketplace, Fitango's Planstore empowers the consumer in some fairly new ways. The Planstore has consumers choosing what they want to do and who they want to provide assistance (whether they choose among experts with similar plans, choose their friends, choose their Facebook community, or choose themselves). Fitango is self-help for the new millenium, but also manages to break self-improvement, personal education, and lifelong learning out of the institutional mold.

I think we're going to see a lot more of this approach, with people taking charge of their own training and education (as well as self-help, small business development, or whatever else) because the Internet provides access to state-of-the-art tools and an extended network of acquaintances/friends/followers/whatever for support and resources. For now, though, Fitango is the only self-improvement game in town.