Monday, March 29, 2010

Another great website idea

I just added a little post over on The Barstool about my current hobby of determining the course of my life with coin tosses.

It occurs to me that this could be another of my 'Brilliant website/business ideas', that this is something I might actually be able to make some money off.


I envisage a giant coin dominating a plain, dark screen (a British gold sovereign, I fancy; or perhaps a guinea). You click to proceed, and the coin flips in an impressive animation. A randomizing function in the webpage program ensures that you will always be suitably in doubt as to whether it will end up showing heads or tails.

I think, to add to the intensity and 'realism' of the experience, you should be required - or at least have the option - to enter into a data field what your action options for each coin-toss outcome are. If you register on the site and provide an e-mail address, you can receive automated follow-ups reminding you of your 'choice', asking if you followed through on it (reminding you of the dire consequences of disobeying THE COIN), wishing you well if you did (or chiding you if you didn't).


Oh yes, I can see that becoming one of the major online fads of the new decade. Lots of money to be made from this!!


[My friend The Weeble has disparagingly pointed out in the comments below that there is already a website that does something of the sort - Random.org, established a dozen years ago by a computer geek from Trinity College, Dublin, and priding itself on being a rare provider of genuinely random numbers rather than those 'pseudo-random' ones we usually have to put up with. This is doubtless a valuable resource for anyone who craves more randomness in their life, but I don't see it as much of an obstacle or competitor to my idea here for a commercial coin-flipping website. Random.org is a terribly earnest and impressively wide-ranging site, but it's also desperately dull - no wit, no pzazz to it at all.]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We regret to inform you.

Anonymous said...

(That was I, the Weeble, by the way. For some reason Blogger is no longer letting me sign comments.)

Froog said...

Even Blogger is ostracizing you now, Weebs?

I don't think Random.org is really any competition for my idea. If that's really the best there is out there so far, I'm on to a winner! I mean, it looks like a frigging Wikipedia page. No animation. No razzmatazz. No shock and awe. No marketing.