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Wi-Fi-enabled scale lets you post your weight online

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Talk about oversharing on the Internet.

This week Fitbit debuted the Wi-Fi-enabled Aria Smart Scale -- a scale that lets users weigh themselves and then digitally send that information to a website where it can be made public for their friends and family and strangers to see.

Some people might consider having a weight audience to be motivating. Others might see it as plain embarrassing.

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To be fair, the raison d’etre of the Wi-Fi scale is not to help you broadcast your weight to the world, but rather to send weight readings to Fitbit’s website where the company’s technology will make fancy charts and graphs to help you understand how you are progressing with your weight-loss goals. And although you are certainly welcome to set this information to be public, it is also possible to keep it private. In fact, private is the default setting.

Fitbit has a history of making electronic tools to help consumers keep track of fitness and weight goals, including the Fitbit Ultra -- a pedometer about the length of two quarters that fits in your pocket and tracks how many steps you’ve taken, how many stairs you’ve climbed, and how many calories you’ve burned doing it all.

The Aria Smart Scale, which also measures BMI and fat percentage, will be available for purchase Tuesday and will start shipping in April. It costs $129.95.

Fitbit is not the first company to venture into the weight sharing space.

Back in 2009, the forward-thinking French company Withings introduced a Wi-Fi-enabled scale that had Twitter capabilities -- allowing the user to automatically tweet weight and fat info. In a news release, Withings declared the Twitter function would be a great help to users, ‘further motivating them by sharing their progress with followers.’

As you may have noticed from the lack of public weight announcements in your Twitter feed, it never really took off in a big way.

Surprise.

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Image credit: Fitbit

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