Last weekend Fetcheveryone released a new game - Fetchpoint - and I think I'm becoming a bit of a coin-collecting addict, and the game is only in "test mode". The official go-live is not until January.

"So what is Fetchpoint and how does it relate to running?" I hear you ask. Well, the whole concept of the game is you collect credits by running, walking, swimming, hopping, skipping and jumping or any other form of activity that can be deemed exercise and for which you can log an entry on Fetch and generate a route, either manually or via GPS.

As you run around your 'hood, you collect points and get docked points depending on which marker you run through (you technically only need to get within 80m of it). At this early state, these are the markers and their descriptions from the Game Guide:

Apparently, more markers will be added as the game evolves.

In the 6 days since this was launched I've kind of neglected the other game I was playing (Conquercise) in favour of running a lot closer to home or work on some very weird and strange winding routes. I'm also not entirely sure how the scoring works as I seem to jump huge numbers each day. Today, for example, I jumped from about 7000 points to well over 11200. Yes, the 12.5km route was a windy coin-collecting session through some neighbourhoods I'd never been through and probably never will again (lets just say I'm glad it wasn't dark), but never expected to collect over 4000 credits.

I think Fetchpoint really appeals to my competitive nature as not only do I see my monthly and annual mileage total increase after each run, but I also see my credits rocketing too. Now if only I could convert those to cash .

Oh yes, all this coin collecting has put the Super Mario Brothers game music and sound effects in my head during several runs now, and I regularly get the urge to jump at random points in my run. Have a listen for yourself and if you go out coin-collecting, I'm sure it'll pop into your head too.

I've just uploaded today's run to FetchEveryone and noticed I've clocked over 100km in a single month for the first time since my return to running, and the month isn't even over yet. Also, every one of these kilometers has been completely barefoot. Woohooo!!!

I've been using Fetcheveryone to log all my running since July 2009 and overall I'm quite pleased with it. I recently discovered dailymile and it certainly looks very pretty (lots of Web2.0rhea) but I'm not convinced by the whole idea of "social training" or whatever they want to call it nor dailymile's overall functionality and behaviour. It seems lacking and buggy.

When developing the the "Latest Training" section in my sidebar, I went hunting for some other site that offers some sort of official widget or gadget to display recent training etc in my site's sidebar. This is how I stumbled upon dailymile. It's got a few interesting widgets so I signed up and hit my first hurdle - no Garmin import support. I quite like and now rely on the import functionality Fetcheveryone has and I now deem it an essential. Accordingly, I put things on hold and didn't even bother trying to use dailymile.

This week I discovered dailymile have finally introduced Garmin import support (beta still): it imports it from the incredibly useless Garmin Connect. With this news, I imported all my training from Garmin. So far so good. It seemed to work quite well, though it didn't import any of the limited notes I put up on Garmin Connect. It seems to have just imported the raw GPS data.

Anyway, with my runs imported I manually set to updating each one and copying my notes across from Fetcheveryone into each run. I then manually entered all this year's runs from Fetcheveryone. It was during all this laborious work that I realised I don't think dailymile is for me.

My current annoyances are:

• You can't independently import routes from anywhere - not MapMyRun, not Fetcheveryone, not from a GPX or TPX file or even directly from your Garmin device unless it's part of importing a run.
• What routes you do have, you can't completely hide. They're either viewable by everyone or just your friends.
• You can't import previous training data from any external source, not even a simple CSV file - this leads to the ball-arch that is manually importing all your data.
• You can't export any of your training, in case you want to switch to somewhere else, or even just so you can perform you own local analysis.
• The website is trying to live up to the hype that is Web 2.0, but sadly this doesn't always work. The javascript that powers most of the site stops responding so you have to refresh the page to give it a kick. This happens on Safari, Firefox and Chrome, all on a Mac. I've not tested on other operating systems, but I doubt it'll be any better.
• You can't edit your "gear" entries, or if you can, it's certainly not intuitive and I didn't find out how short of adding a new item and removing the old.
• The preferences and settings are not all centralised in one place. You have to hunt around for the various settings.

It's not all bad. I quite like the idea of their widgets, the fact the site isn't smothered in advertising and it's fresh modern look, though it could do with looking a lot less like Facebook in places, but that's about it.

My only issues, and these are really just niggles, with Fetcheveryone are:

• it's not the prettiest of sites
• the "Barefoot" shoe type doesn't show up in the sidebar (I like to be able to quickly glance and see how much of my running has been barefoot)
• and there are no widgets for easy sharing of data onto any other site, though they do offer several methods to export different data.

Otherwise everything it intuitive and seems to just work and work well.

I'm not going to stop using dailymile just yet. I'll keep entering data on it for a while longer to see if it grows on me and to see if the issues I've highlighted are resolved anytime soon (I'm not holding my breath though as the Garmin import support took forever to arrive, despite being advertised as "coming soon" since dailymile's inception). Time will tell. Until then, I think I'll keep hacking away at my own "widgets" for Fetcheveryone.

Over all I think dailymile is aimed more at the Facebook/Twitter addicted fun runners who want to natter than those who want a highly functional and detailed online location to store their training runs.