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Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

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81–90 of 173 posts

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#81
1) Music (writing and performing).

2) Writing fiction.

3) Create a programming language.

4) Audio "visualization" of complex data. It's an idea I've had for a long time: turn multi-dimensional data into sound (not necessarily musical) using pitch, rhythm, overtones, beats, and many other parameters. I figure our brains might be able to parse sounds easier than images for certain kinds of data.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#83

A bittorrent plugin for firefox with no UI. e.g. downloading a torrent has the exact same interaction as downloading a file over HTTP. Seeding == leaving it in your downloads list, advanced power user preferences are tucked in an about: page. Bittorrent for the masses.

I had the almost exact same idea, I also wanted to automatically convert any website into a torrent. It would be P2P browsing and the end of slashdotting small websites. Spikes in hits would not bring anyone down. But then I got a job at a biotech startup.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#85
A better wikipedia. One where every article is cryptographically signed by the author and there is only ONE author. Articles are then user moderated up or down like here.

I also wouldn't exclude anything and would allow articles of any length and detail.

I imagine the end result would be something very much like wikipedia as the community would vote wikipedia-like articles to the top.

But vandalism would be impossible and every encyclopedia style article could link into a much longer article on the same subject. Known authors could sign their articles. So Linus could write something about Git, but the community could still vote some git's article higher then Linus.

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#87
Product design. Cool widgets. For example, I would love to design a widget that can show me meaning of a word, in different languages, once placed over book, road-signs, billboards, LCDs and etc. Ultra-portable dictionary. So, it's going to be product design, just for fun. We're not talking about any moolah ;)

Re: Ask: What would you do/make if you never had to monetize it?

#88
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "special sauce" does Facebook have that couldn't be implemented as a self-installed "plugin" on a personal web site? - It'd be nice to be able to plug my favorite artist/author/etc. So I'd vote for whatever ads the profile owner wants to put on his/her profile. - Why not have each person's data held under the watchful eye of the hosting provider they're already with? - Last I checked you can delete your 1and1/dr…

I think these are interesting points, and the dream project would have to be syndicatable so hackers could roll their own pages as you suggest. The issue is that facebook is great because so many people are on it. So for the dream project to work, it has to be really easy to set up. I am guessing that the average user does not want to grab a dreamhost account, install software, etc.

While you're not monetizing things, you might as well create a new Web server OS where it's actually easy to install applications.
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