If you’re looking to set your New Year’s resolutions, you know that there aren’t any checks and balances to make sure you’ve completed them, unless you’ve published them to the web and fear the backlash of being called a failure or quitter.

One site wants to blackmail you into completing a task, while holding a compromising photo over your head during the process. The twist? You set your own goals, upload your own photos, and your friends get to decide whether you’ve successfully completed the task or not.

Aherk!, a simple web app, wants you to set your own ticking time bomb and achieve your goals out of pure fear of public humiliation. Will anyone actually do it though?

Lose 10 lbs or post a pic of your arse

Accountability might be the last piece of the puzzle that’s holding you back from reaching all of your goals. Aherk wants to be that accountability, and then some. You can add as many tasks with deadlines to the site as you want, and for it to be effective you’re supposed to upload a photo that you really don’t want anyone to see. Up until the deadline, your friends can vote on whether you’ve hit your goal or not.

In regards to the photo that you’re supposed to upload, Aherk refers to it as “The Bomb Photo”:

This is the photo that we will upload to Facebook if your friends tell us that you’ve failed to achieve your goal. For Aherk! to be effective, it needs to be something that you really don’t want to see posted on Facebook.

And if you think that you can just change your mind later, not so fast, Aherk won’t let you edit or delete the goal or photo once you’ve added it:

While it’s a cute idea, I don’t think this is something that I’d actually do. As Alex Wilhelm, our in-house prankster at The Next Web, puts it:

What if your friends are &$#&@, and just say no to &%@# with you?

Good point. But if you do trust your friends to vote on the up-and-up, this might be a fun way to get some of those goals out of the way that you keep skipping over every year. Beware of what you upload though, because if your fail your goal, the photo will be posted publicly for all of your friends to see.

In the end, it might be worth it.

➤ Aherk!

Here are 5 ways that you can, and we think you’ll like them a lot.

1 – Plan Your Meals

You have some ingredients, but you have no idea what to do with them. While you could browse websites like Supercook to get ideas, sometimes you can’t be bothered.

There’s a lovely Twitter account that can help you with that. Simply send a message with the ingredients that you have on hand and you’ll get a reply with recipe suggestions. While it doesn’t work flawlessly just yet, it should get better.

2 – Track Your Packages

Well sure, you could keep going to the FedEx or UPS website every few hours to see where your incoming piece of gadgety goodness is hanging out. Or you could send a tweet.

TrackThis is a service that, once you’ve followed it and sent its Twitter account and sent it a tracking number, will update you via Direct Message for each step that happens along the path. The end result? Something like this:

3 – Post To Your Evernote Account

OK, this one is dead simple. Follow @myEN on Twitter. In a few seconds, you’ll get a Direct Message. Once you do, head to the URL in the message to link your Evernote and Twitter accounts. Then, send a message to @myEN on Twitter and you’ll get it stuck into your Evernote as a private message. Easy, eh?

4 – Update Your Google Calendar

While it’s dead simple to open up your iCal or Google Calendar it’s even easier to send a message like “Meeting with Alex on Friday at 3pm.” Twittercal lets you do just that.

In order to take advantage of the service, you’ll need to add @gCal as a friend on Twitter. The account will add you back, and then you need to head to the site in order to grant access to your Twitter and Calendar apps. You can then send it a Direct Message with the details of your calendar addition. That’s handy stuff.

5 – Track Fitness Goals

There are a number of great options for this one, but if you want to track your weight loss then Weight Loss Charts is about as easy as you’ll get. Just sign up (the process is really simple and fast) then send a message with your weight each day. What you’ll get in return is a clean, simple chart displaying your progress.

We’re sure that there are loads of things that you can do that we haven’t covered here. Have some? Add them to the comments. Want more cool ways to do things? Keep reading through TNW Lifehacks.