SickWeather is launching its service in closed beta, allowing interested individuals to test out the service before the general public gets an opportunity to do the same.

Those participating in the beta program will be able to access the following features:

• Sickweather Map – which provides an overview of where symptoms occur in real-time, like a weather map showing cloud and storm activity. When zoomed out, it shows polygons that represent groupings of many individual instances of people talking about the selected symptom layer. As you zoom in, the polygons may begin to “break up” to adjust for area density. Zoom in further still and you will start to see the individual points as represented by the cloud icon.
• News Feed – By connecting your Facebook account (Twitter coming soon), you will be able to keep track of health related news from your online social circles. During the Beta process, you will only be able to view these posts rather than interact with them, but more interactive features will come later. At this stage, so called “false positives” as still present as algorithm is still fine-tuned to ignore posts like “those were some sick beats at the club last night.”
• Symptom Reporting – To update Sickweather with your own symptoms, you may use the dropdown menu of symptoms directly beneath “How are you feeling today?” at the top. Qualified data from this feature will be applied to the map, but you might not see an immediate result during closed beta testing.

And that’s obviously just a start with new features coming soon…