(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)

Another day, another kooky web idea. This time, it’s the Stock Moose. We’ve had a lot of debate at work on how to gather data, how to present that data, and how to make that collection/presentation process engaging enough that someone might actually enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it (rather than tying it to some future promise of “Oh, we’ll give you an edge on the trading room floor”). Back when the college football season was in full swing, Yahoo! introduced what they called the Team Ranker. The concept is incredibly simple: pick two teams out of a hat and display them both (with perhaps a few bits of useful info such as a win-loss record or… a stock chart). The user simply has to click on the one they think is better. Period.

Whichever team (or in this case, stock) has the best win percent is rated as #1, and the rest are sorted accordingly. The system was far too simple to game, at least for football. What this usually meant is that earlier in the day (when the East Coast is awake and voting) highly ranked teams in the SEC and other eastern conferences dominated the rankings. When it got later in the afternoon, teams with East Coast fan bases slipped in the rankings while PAC-10 teams rose into the top spots. This is unavoidable for something like football, where fans are fiercely loyal to their own teams over all others–but is the same true for stocks?

Would users on the East coast sway the list towards East-coast stalwarts like Coke and Home Depot while the West coast might favor silicon valley darlings over all others? It’s hard to say–especially considering that I limited the field to the Nasdaq 100, which is primarily dominated by tech stocks.

The beauty of today’s technology, though, is that these debates don’t have to remain purely academic. The Stock Moose is thin. It’s very, very thin. But rather than spend a few hours swapping emails back and forth with my bosses on whether or not something like that would even work, tools like Heroku make it possible to just go build it. I spent a grand total of around four hours kicking that thing out, and probably half of that time was spent trying to decide on a name for it (and then trying to explain to my girlfriend why I needed her to draw me a moose with a tie). The other half was spent cooking up the round-robin logic, which is probably way too complicated. Building something like this within our own code base–or even hosting it on our own servers without asking permission–would be unthinkable.

If we ultimately decide it’s a failure (which most little web projects are), what’s the cost? There’s always a chance, though, that something so simple (and arguably, so ugly) might go viral. If that happens–and that’s a big IF–what do we get? A little free advertising. If it doesn’t happen, we’ve still profited: we can now cross something else off our list and move towards a more targeted product.

Besides, Stock Moose has a nice ring to it.