It’s not often I highlight a work project here on my blog, but the Tinderhouse team has been hard at work over the past months creating a new service that we’re launching very soon.

It’s called Map My Tracks and is a tracking tool for sportsmen and women. With a GPS-enabled mobile phone or non-GPS phone with a simple external GPS receiver you can track your runs, walks, bike rides, sailing trips; in fact just about anything that involves moving from one place to another.

While out and about you can view a map or satellite image of your location and check out basic statistics. Once back home you can view your track on the web, replay it, analyse it and see even more information. What’s really clever is that your track is plotted in real time on the web. The service works anywhere in the world where you can get a mobile connection with data.

Here’s a track from a quick lunchtime run that I did earlier in the week:

The uses for a tool like this are really varied:

• coaches can use the tracks to show you where you went wrong compared to your competitors
• friends and family could watch your progress during a race (and if all the competitors had Map My Tracks you could see where you were in the race and lots of other helpful statistics)
• motivate yourself by racing against a previous track on the same course, showing how your performance improves with training

Plus we’ve tried to include some web 2.0 goodness too. Tracks can be tagged, shared, embedded, commented on and exported. There’s a Map My Tracks blog as well where we’ll be highlighting ways to use the service and new features as they launch. My particular favourite trick at the moment is to export a track to Google Earth and then fly through the track – great for showing other people where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to (I’ll post a video of that when I get time to record one).

The site’s in beta testing right now so it’s invitation only I’m afraid before the launch in February. That said we’re always on the look out for willing beta testers to help us make sure the software works on as many different handsets as possible, to iron out any bugs on the site and to help us develop features that make the service even more valuable, particularly for sports that we’re less familiar with (between us we run, cycle and sail).

If you’d like beta access to the site, please email us at support@mapmytracks.com and we’ll take it from there. It’d be really helpful if you could tell us what handset/mobile operator you use too.

Disclosure: I work for Tinderhouse, amongst others.