This article advocates shame/embarrassment as effective deterrents to eating the wrong foods.

With RunKeeper, many of our users have told us that auto-posting their runs/bike rides/etc. to twitter and Facebook has served as a powerful positive motivator, since they want their social graph to be impressed with how far they ran, their pace per mile/KM, etc.

I guess the question is whether negative social accountability would be equally as effective.  For example, what if there was a post to my Facebook page every time I ate a cookie?  Or every time I drank a beer, if I was a recovering alcoholic?

Withings, the maker of a wi-fi scale, has started down this path by enabling your weight to be auto-tweeted every time you step on a scale.  And I heard of another company that tweets every time you make a credit card purchase (is that Blippy?).

It will be very interesting to see where all of this goes.  To me, it seems that both can be effective, but I have a personal bias towards more positive motivators, as they ultimately will make your success more rewarding and fun.  But the negative motivators could be a powerful complement that you may not want to ignore.

What do you think?