Aherk! is an ingenious online service that allows people to blackmail themselves in order to achieve their personal goals, through pressure.

If you’ve had trouble dealing with personal goals, but always manage to do good in school or at work, you probably already know it has something to do with feeling under pressure. Some people see it as a bad thing, but for most of us it’s the engine that drives us in our everyday lives. Just think about it for a second, you’re always trying to meet your deadlines and be productive, because you know otherwise you’ll be faced with immediate bad consequences, like getting a pay cut or worse, being fired. But we never really face that kind of pressure in our personal lives, so simple goals like losing weight, quitting smoking or saving money are really harder to reach. That’s where Aherk! comes in…

What started out as a game among friends, now has the potential to become one of the most popular apps on the Internet. It’s called Aherk! and it’s goal is to allow you to blackmail yourself into finally achieving those goal you’ve been postponing for so long. Sure, you can find a lot of other motivational apps out there, but as we all know, motivation works really well when there’s something truly important on the line. Aherk! makes sure you have that something to fight for. How, you ask? By posting an embarrassing photo of you on Facebook, for all your friends to see. The brilliant part is you have to submit the photo to Aherk! yourself.

A photo uploaded on Aherk!

Raphael Caldas, the brilliant mind behind Aherk!, says the service started out as a game between friends, while he was learning to program in Rails, but it became public almost by accident and has recently become pretty popular. The simplicity of Aherk! is probably what makes it so fun to use. All you have to do is log into it with your Facebook account, set your goal and a deadline for it, and then upload a compromising photo of yourself. Once you reach the deadline, your Facebook friends will be asked to vote if you’ve successfully reached your goal. Depending on how they vote, this photo you never wanted anyone to see may be uploaded to your Facebook account.

A photo uploaded on Aherk!

Aherk is far from completed, as it doesn’t even have a privacy policy yet, to let users know how their photos are being used, and there’s a lot of tweaking to be done, but the idea behind it is pretty funny, and just might get people to finally reach their personal goals.