A Virtual Weight Loss Gadget

Hi everyone. My name is Adriana and I developed the virtual weight loss gadget you see on the right sidebar. Isadora has kindly let me spout off about it here.

Although we've had this free virtual model for people to put on their website sidebars for a while now, just two weeks ago we got accepted as a gadget in iGoogle.

So now anyone who wants to try it on their own private iGoogle page can do so.

We are hoping to get some comments from people about the gadget. It's meant to be a fun tool for weight loss inspiration in that it shows what you might look like at your heaviest weight, current weight and goal weight.

One reader recently complained that the gadget makes a 100 pound woman look good in a red dress. This is something we need to fix very soon, as currently the images only go down to a BMI of 18, and everything below that looks the same. We definitely don't want to encourage thin people to try to get even thinner and are very aware of the serious illness of anorexia. (Update February 2008: We've made this change now.)

We realize this virtual model is simplistic and there's little people can add on it to make it look more like themselves. But our mega maniacal hope is that if enough people like it and use it, that we might qualify for Google's gadget seed investment program. At that point we would receive the funding to develop this model into something much more versatile and exciting!

There is one other virtual model that we are aware of and this is much more sophisticated than ours. It's called the My Virtual Model and it was developed by a very successful company that employs over 100 people. (See my overview of My Virtual Model on Squidoo for more info). One day we'd like to compete with My Virtual Model ! ;-)

I hope you have fun trying this gadget out and would appreciate any feedback.