Last night Nike launched the beta version of their new NikePlus website. They combined a lot of the blog and editorial features of the Nike Running Blog with the Nike Store to produce an integrated experience. They also expanded the social part of the previous site giving users their own profile pages, the ability to add friends, and manage challenges in a more robust social setting.

Nike has expanded some of my favorite concepts on the NikePlus site. One of the best aspects of using the product is the motivation I get from learning about my runs in real time as well as documenting them over the months that I have been training. Nike’s new site elaborates on this idea in a beautiful way which boosts my motivation to keep training. For example, they added a color coded “distance-line” to indicate how runners have been performing since they joined NikePlus. Do you need motivation to advance to the next color level? It’s all on the “distance-line.” I have 941 miles to go before reaching my next level!

While the Nike site excels in beauty, shine and newness, it is lacking a bit on the technical side. The site is entirely flash, which follows the Nike web presence tradition. Nike has some deep and powerful technology behind each of its sites, but creating site with such robust functionality requires some heavy lifting and when the product was released last night, someone’s arms got tired. Twitter runners who use the system were having trouble logging in, connecting with friends, and uploading new runs. All of these complications led to a fairly large dump, and the site eventually crashed browsers and couldn’t surface data to the client-side. Good thing there’s a “feedback” button!

I still remain impressed with Nike’s running system, and I love using it to keep a record of all of my runs – if not for the amazing technology, then just because I want to get to the next color level!