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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#51

Post by frankus »

antiismist wrote: post #13

The "free" facebook. - no ads, period - all personal info is held under the watchful eye of a seperate, non-profit org that ensures no personal info is ever shared with third parties - you can delete your own account whenever you want, and you won't get hassled. An actual deletion of your data, too - all source code is open source, and people can contribute whatever features they want

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/dreamhost/whatever account any time you want by no longer paying them.

- And it could be a GPLed project.

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

#52

Post by aristus »

royce wrote: post #43
aristus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd do what libraries do: collect and preserve. Several already exist, like archive.org and Google cache. But Google's cache exists for Google's purposes. Archive.org is often forced to take down material, especially since the DMCA. You need a real decentralized network that is both lawyer- and disaster-resistant. It is impossible for, say, the New York Times to change or obliterate what it printed on some day in…

You might also want to take a look at LOCKSS (I'm not affiliated; just thought it was interesting): "LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is an international non-profit community initiative that provides tools and support so libraries can easily and cost-effectively preserve today’s web-published materials for tomorrow’s readers." Currently OpenBSD-based, but I think that I heard that they are looking to migrate t…

That's a beautiful thing. Thank you. It's shrewd to get traditional libraries involved -- they pay for subscriptions and Lexis already, and they are much harder politically to sue down.

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

#53

Post by Xichekolas »

rcoder wrote: post #37

I'd work on a free, secure set of tools for the IT needs of non-profit organizations. Hosted and LiveCD/appliance deployment options, and containing a full, truly usable stack for CRM, fundraising, event planning, and publishing. There's interesting work going on in the problem space, (CiviCRM being the 500lb. gorilla) but no free turnkey solutions I know of. Some organizations literally have to beg to scrape up the…

Google released something for non-profits today...

http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

Not sure if it does all they need, but ironic timing.

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

#54

Post by TheWama »

One day I'd like to start one or more schools based on the Monitorial (not Montessori) approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitorial_schools).

It takes a good amount of capital and respect to start a school and have people trust you to apply an uncommon (though potentially very beneficial) approach to schooling on their kids, so in the mean time I'm trying to earn that respect/capital.

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

#55

Post by iamwil »

A way to tell where my friends are, and direct them as to where to go and what to do. Kinda like remote control your friends when you're stuck at the office, or if you were the only one that didn't get to go on the vacation.

A "keyboard" that changes is form and texture to be different interfaces.

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

#58

Post by Prrometheus »

dkokelley wrote: post #16
Xichekolas wrote: post #8

An alternative to hierarchical file systems.

I've been thinking recently about that too. It's inefficient to use a traditional folder/file system, at least for your personal documents (for system and program files I think they're better off the original way.) What about folders that represent tags? I could tag a file (say a picture) with Danny (my name), Vacation, and 2007. The system creates 4 "folders" as we understand them, each one labeled with a tag, and t…

At my work, some people organize documents on the shared drive by date and others by location of the client. So, if you want to look for the pitch we did for a certain Virginia client in January 2006 you first have to check the /Virginia/ folder and then check the /2006/Jan/ folder. If it's not in either one of those, it may be in /smith/companies/name_of_company/, where "smith" is the name of the guy that originally authored the documents. It's a mess.

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

#60

Post by Tichy »

Locke wrote: post #21

I'm doing this right now, with a game site devoted to multi-player turn-based strategy games. It's still a small site (as far as the number of players go) and I'm sure it could be monetized, but I doubt it'd make much money right now. Certainly not enough to put it outside the realm of just doing this for fun. The site's Vying Games (vying.org) if you want to check it out. : ))

looks good
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