“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Think about how many times in your life that you’ve had that conversation, either with a companion or the friendly little voice inside your head. You could pull some creepy old board game out of the attic and run the risk of rhinos destroying your house. Or, better yet, you could take advantage of today’s startup idea.
My idea is a site that gives you a personalized list of things to do, such as recommended movies, books, games, activities, etc.. Here’s how it would work. First, users would be presented with a wizard-like interface that would display four movies, books, or games. Users would click on whichever of the four choices they like the best. After making 10-15 choices, the system should have enough info to run a Netflix/Amazon style of recommendation query to get a list of “If you liked X, you’ll probably like Y” types of additional entertainment choices.
Once the system had a list of entertainment options, the user would be presented a list of “27 movies you must see before you outgrow the humor”, “12 books you need to read before they make it to Oprah’s book club”, “15 places that the girl of your dreams might be hanging out right now”, etc, etc.. Alongside each item on each list would be a quick “Loved It/Hated It” type of rating system to provide more feedback on movies that you’ve already seen or books that you’ve already read. Of course you could share your lists with your friends, do simple comparisons around ‘You Like X% of the Same Movies as Your Friend Sally”, and display your lists on the social network of your choosing. One last feature – let’s say you’re at the video store and don’t know what to rent, you could send a quickly text “movie” to the “What To Do” short code and receive a text message containing several of the top rentals from your movie list.
Editor’s Note: Today I happened to check out the new offering from Comcast called FanCast.com. Believe it or not, it does 90% of what I outlined above! Go sign up and see how it works – pretty crazy stuff…
