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Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

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Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#241

Post by TweedHeads »

almost wrote: post #237
TweedHeads wrote: post #196

A magnifying glass with bluetooth to project the images on your pc, with a shutter to take snapshots of what you're looking at, with different zoom levels and as powerful as a microscope. Imagine the kids running around the house taking shots of worms, spiders, ants, etc. and sharing them online.

You can buy a USB microscope at my local Maplins store.

I know, but I mean something more portable. You can't take the microscope around looking for stuff. Bring the lens to the bug, not the bug to the lens.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#242

Post by emmett »

rrhyne wrote: post #156
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

Ad exploder. An add-in for FF and IE that lets you "explode" ads by clicking on them, complete with sound effects and animation (or not). After you explode the ad, you'll never see any more material in that spot again. I don't just want to not see ads, I want something with some visceral action, something to make the ads not want to come back! -- ie, something fun.

If you dropped the part about never seeing an ad there again, you could probably get display Ad companies to pay you for each explosion as a click, because if a user exploded it, then they saw the ad. Then, you'd LOVE ads!

Ad companies would probably like that anyway...they wouldn't be wasting their money advertising to people who were not interested in their ads.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#243

Post by tptacek »

jacobolus wrote: post #209
tptacek wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want blogs to look like Usenet, so that best affordance for a response is another blog post, not a comment. Comments are evil. There's enough structure in blogs (blogrolls, tags, date, author, backlinks) --- especially if you mine comments --- to do take a stab at this.

I'm interested to hear why you think comments are evil. Would there be any way to make that discussion-like structure accept input from anonymous, infrequent, or lazy users? Setting up a blog just to reply might leave out some decent responses.

They're second-class outlets. A blog author can say whatever they want; their posts are first-class elements in Google's corpus; the medium encourages stand-alone writing instead of meaningless squibs.

The original vision of the "blogosphere" rejected comments. "Write a blog post, instead." Here's an old, well-known example:

http://www.markbernstein.org/Apr0401/Whyblogcommentsarebad.h...

The problem right now is that the affordances favor comments over posts. The first step is to adjust them; it just so happens that by making a threaded blog-group reader, you're also providing a lot of value to people who don't care that comments are evil, but do find it hard to follow 10 different blogs talking about the same thing.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#244

Post by nazgulnarsil »

tremendo wrote: post #182

A Pandora equivalent for pr0n. Enter/grade a few images you like or dislike, build a profile and "stations" to group similar kinds of content. Maybe these profiles could be condensed into some short-length string--say a Meyer-Briggs type of string (INTP, etc)--that you can then carry with you without having to actually give out personal info, but that says hey, according to this standard, these are my likes/dislikes…

I've wondered myself about the market for allowing people to drill down through multiple fetishes. the vast majority of sites organize by single fetishes. what if you could input a bunch of fetishes and it would automatically find the videos that have the most tags in common with your search? this would work best with something that supported user tags, so people could find and tag specific elements.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#245

Post by brl »

limmeau wrote: post #79

A database of MAC addresses of stolen equipment. Participants install a client which listens for the MAC addresses of all computers in the local network, alerting the participant that the new possessor of a stolen MacBook Pro 15", 2006 edition, two deep scratches on the lid, seems to be nearby. Of course, you'd have to find a way of guarding against malicious entries.

This idea would work really well if you implemented it in wireless access points since they are already listening for Probe Request packets from stations that aren't associated to their network.

This means that if anybody opens a stolen laptop in the vicinity of one of these APs it would be detected without requiring that the laptop be associated to the local network.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#246

Post by zupatol »

guruz wrote: post #69

An app that increases the number of hours a day has, e.g. makes time flow slower. That way I could accomplish more ;)

To increase the number of hours a day, make a watch with hours that last less than 60 minutes. This way you will work more hours in a day.

To make time flow slower, make a watch where hours last more than 60 minutes. That way you will accomplish more in each hour.

I prefer the second solution. Productivity is more important than hours worked.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#247

Post by bmelton »

bmelton wrote: post #232
inglorian wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoops, sorry. Meant to upvote and downvoted accidentally instead. Am upvoting two of your other comments to make up for it.

I upvoted to offset your downvote. That said, I think there's an android app I saw recently on the market that does this. I'll install it later and see how closely it compares to the features mentioned.

After an initial download, and about 10 minutes worth of testing, I have concluded that the Android Market "Shopping List" app sucks. It's a decent first attempt at a shopping list app, but it has (basically) two features -- add items to the list, and check items as done. The checking of items as done doesn't throw them to the bottom of the list or do anything other than put a check next to them.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#248

Post by lehmannro »

there wrote: post #139

a reverse of friendfeed.com that pushes updates to all of your services. if someone changes their avatar picture, email address, name (marriage), location, etc., they should be able to do it on one site and have it pushed to all of the other sites that user is a member of. authentication would be a big problem, but you're smart, figure it out.

http://ping.fm/ is not there yet but you two are heading into the same direction I think.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#249

Post by theantidote »

bemmu wrote: post #214
theantidote wrote: post #54

A Taxi service site and iPhone app. Lets you send your current location to the cab company with your iPhone and then track the cab as it arrives. Maybe even offer a prepay option so you can pay with your paypal account and just read off a confirmation number to the cab driver or something at the end of the trip for them to bill you with. Maybe in order to prevent confusion over more than one cab being called from the…

Why are you disappointed that it exists? My reaction is more like "great, that problem is solved, now I can make something else".

I just thought I was original but it turned out I wasn't.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#250

Post by petercooper »

IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #145
olefoo wrote: post #63

A cradle that updates the baby's facebook page based on decibels, activity, dampness.

how is babby warmed?

For those who didn't get the parent's joke: http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf
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