3, 2, 1… eehh, Counto?

We wait in lines, at stop signs and traffic signals. We wait for computers to start-up and for sites to load. We wait for our birthdays and anniversaries and for new iPhone and Android phones to come out.

It is estimated that in the average lifetime we wait 5 years. Or more than an hour every day.

Dusseldorf based Counto.com wants to make waiting slightly more interesting for you. Previously available at createyourcountdown.com they have just renamed their service Counto.

For our conferences and events I have often developed my own counters. It isn’t that hard to do in PHP except that, well, you have to know PHP.

Counto lets you choose a title, date and then generates an embed code for you which you an embed, like this:

That is a countdown counter until my birthday. Mark your calendars.

What sucks about the service is that you have to sign up for an account and authenticate your email before you can do anything. I’d prefer a simple page where you can enter a date and get a widget right away. I understand that Counto wants to build a userbase but this sign-up procedure will limit their growth enormously.

On the other hand, how enormously could they grow in the first place? Although the idea is cute I don’t see a huge market for countdown widgets myself.

But I could be wrong and have been many times before. Maybe someone should make a counter for that. Are you going to add one to your site? I’m not counting down for that to happen.

UPDATE: See, I’m wrong again. You CAN get a counter without creating an account. It just is easy to overlook that option as the front page urges you to sign-up first. Anyway “Boris = wrong +1”.