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Bebepool New Feature: Selectable Pool Components

Published 2009-10-14 03:05
bebepool.com

I distinctly remember a number of visits to the local 31 Flavors ice cream shop as a youngster. I mean right there in the name of the place, it shouts: "Sure, you're stuck with your school/ job/ life, but here we have more choices for you than you have whims."

Going through a box of keepsakes this summer, I stumbled upon a coupon to the old haunt. It looked crisp, but was slightly expired: 1983. Such a loss.

Back to the namesake: THIRTY ONE FLAVORS. The extravagance of choice. Now, choice can also be a daily source of unnecessary mental strain. That flip-side belongs in a blog post for another day, but I'll say one more thing about it. When it came to soft-serve, I was always the "chocolate-vanilla swirl" guy because I was, to put it plainly, indecisive in such matters.

But what do distant memories of frozen sugar-milk puffed with air have to do with bebepool? Fair enough.

So bebepool.com just got a lot more choice built in. From the beginning you could craft your own introduction and change the title of your pool, but all those burning questions that make up the friendly contest: DOB, boy or girl, length, weight ... nine in all – those were written in stone and required upon participants submitting a guess.

Now you decide. The administrator of each pool can, via the control panel, turn on/off any combination of these available pool elements:

date of birth     time of birth    weight    length    
hair    eyes    first name    middle name    comments

 
Here's an example pool using a custom selection of components.

The cherry on top (or maybe you're all about the chocolate sprinkles) is you can now Lock your pool if that's helpful at any point. You can unlock it just as easily. Previously, you could only prevent further guess entries if you completed the pool which means putting in the actual results, at which point it's all over (well, until next time). Now just Lock/Unlock your pool at will via the control panel. Handy, right? That's the hope.

Technically, the upgrade to bebepool has been operational for three days now. And though the sample size is small, this statistic really speaks to how much demand there was for this level of customization:

73% of new pools opted to change the default settings via the new Select Pool Components feature

If you have used or are currently using bebepool.com as a fun way to engage your family and friends with the joy of expecting a new daughter or son: Thank you. It was at least 30 hours of work (late-night programming time mostly) and worth every minute knowing that the most requested change to bebepool was materializing.

So, bebepool community, what's next on the list, what change to bebepool.com would most useful to you? Please let me know (leave a blog comment below or use the Contact form).

 

Micah
bebepool.com creator / administrator

 

PS. Incidentally, the ice cream cone was more or less popularized in North America because someone had a crazy idea on how the ice cream guy and the penny waffle guy could together fashion a concession treat that would fetch a handsome 10 cents. See, they were busy innovating and whatnot—who had time to worry about enforcing silly expiry dates. But no bitterness here, no sir.