My list of ideas, if you're looking for inspiration
When I saw jgc's 1,000 (bad) ideas post I was hoping that it would actually
have 1,000 ideas in it. Sadly not, but I can imagine he did not want
to throw all his 'good stuff' out there for the world to see.
Since I have more ideas than I have time, here is my list.
Plenty of the ideas below are bad or even ridiculous, but there
is some good stuff in there too. I don't get close to 1,000 that's
mostly because I've self-censored and removed the majority of the
really crappy ones (before that this list was 900 entries long...) :)
What I usually do if I have an idea is register a domain name for
them, the trick here is that if the idea isn't worth throwing $7
at for a domain name then it is by definition a bad idea so that
first investment is used as a filter against the very worst ones.
Meanwhile (since I had these) no doubt a whole bunch of them have
been implemented.
They're listed in alphabetic order of their working titles, not
in execution potential so if the first few are 'uninteresting' to you
keep reading, there are better ones further down.
Some of the stuff in here is interesting enough that just writing these little
5 line blurbs about them gets me wondering about implementation again.
Since the value of an idea is exactly $0 there are obviously no
restrictions on any of this, so if you're looking for inspiration
read through the list and see if there is anything in there that
you think has legs, either in the original or in some variation on it,
that's how the list is meant to be used.
Some of them would take an afternoon or two to implement, some of
them a lifetime worth of dedication.
Feel free to go and run with any of them or ask me questions about
them ( j@ww.com or http://twitter.com/jmattheij ).
Update, apparently, at least one of these has been implemented, if
you come across more that have been implemented please let me know
so I can link to them.
- (1) 3adomains
A registrar where you can buy single domains for $1 over the required fees.
Make the money through constant domain auctions and escrow arrangements.
- (2) A-Tie
Sell ties online (I've *never* worn one!), ties are a collectors item
and lots of people will spend insane amounts of money on them. - (3) Adalyn
A virtual girl that you can teach stuff. She's very curious, anything
you tell her will be analyzed and if she doesn't understand something
she'll ask you to tell her more about it.Paired with 'askadalyn' which allows kids to ask adalyn questions
that she herself can ask of adults, the answers of course are
cached so next time around adalyn will be a bit smarter.Used as a way for kids to ask a 'peer' online that is very knowledgable.
I actually built adalyn, it went quite far before the 'pranksters'
started to teach her about child porn and other 'funny' stuff (not
funny at all if you ask me), so I shut it down but I'm still very
tempted to revive this with better content oversight. - (4) AdFreeZone
An internet corner where commerce is strictly outlawed, information
only. In a way wikipedia does this, but the idea was to not have
notability criteria and such but to simply provide a huge non
commercial playground. - (5) AdProfs
A new generation of advertising company, 100% transparent, showing
both what the buyer paid for your space, our take and your net.All the usual suspects, click tracking, CPM/CPC/Performance based
advertising and a built in affiliate program. - (6) AeWiki
A wiki centering around alternative energy, which is a market that
has tons of snake-oil and misinformation floating out there as well
as a lot of good stuff. Think of it as a clearing house for solid
info and tools that you can use to help you size alternative
energy installations and to do a bunch of back-of-the-envelope
calculations for you. Also warnings about alternative energy
scams (there are plenty of those). - (7) AfMijn
A clock based auction system where you set the lowest price that you
wish to get for your goods. This would operate like a video game,
new auctions would start all the time and would run for exactly one
minute or until someone hits the 'mine' button. Buyers and sellers
would be ID'd before being allowed on the site so no ebay scammers
and other bull. Serious bidders and sellers only. The clock would
start at a high multiple of your lowest acceptable price and count
down after the auction starts. - (8) Afrux
A linux distribution concentrating on the African continent with all the
documentation and associated websites available in as many African
continent languages as possible and with a network of 'local support'
built in. - (9) AjaxBricks
A collection of ajax modules hosted by a single third party that are designed
to work together to allow you to 'click' together a working web app.Uploaded modules would be reviewed and included in the 'core' if they pass
muster, but anything could be part of 'contrib', the free for all collection.Each 'brick' would be versioned, upgrades would only be done if there are
security issues or other urgent fixes, no 'switching your script' with
something malicious while you aren't watching. - (10) ArticleBody
A service that given a url will extract the article text and will strip
off any navigation, widgets, advertising and so on. This seems trivial
but is actually quite a tough problem to get 100% right all the time. - (11) AslProfile
A site where you can gradually reveal your 'real life' data to strangers
found on the internet based on the trust level that you've developed
towards them. - (12) AutoTagger
A site that figures out what a text is about and automatically tags it
accordingly.I've actually built a working prototype of this, good enough for casual
use but not perfect, but I'm convinced the method behind it is solid,
it just needs better input data. - (13) CheapDriving
The cost of operating a vehicle seems to be in rapid ascent, a collection of
tips and tricks per country on how you can reduce the cost of personal
transportation as much as possible. - (14) BoostOrBan
A web variation on the 'shark tank' idea, wannabe investors pay $100
for a vote on start-ups, the ones that get the most votes in 30 days
will get the prizes the rest will never be heard from again, a
part of the $100 will get converted in to stock given back to the
original voters so everybody that votes will always end up with
stock in something. - (15) BoostStrap
A business model for the new milennium. More to follow on this one,
it's very ambitious, I've been working on it for fully 10 years now
and I hope that this year I'll finally be ready to launch it to a
slightly larger public than just the select people I work with at
the moment. - (16) CamelMarket
A dating site for people with a sense of humor, that recognize
that it is impossible to decide who is 'good for you' without
actually meeting in person over an extended period. - (17) Cameria
Anagram of America, the 'free world' where you can join in groups
to roam the internet at large. Any page you visit you take your
'followers' along with you, and everybody shows up as little
avatars on top of the pages visited. Now known as 'crowdsurfing'. - (18) CarOs
A real time patched linux based ECU for cars, for a fraction of the
price of a replacement ECU for your vehicle with adapter plugs
to allow you to drop it in to just about anything.To break the ridiculous pricing that automobile manufacturers use
when it comes to ordering replacement ECUs. - (19) CdXchg
A place where you can exchange cds, you mail one that is wanted
by someone and in return we mail you one from our stock. Prime
it by buying up lots of used CDs, a buck per CD + postage. - (20) CellBattle
A variation on core-wars, you get a 'vehicle', a cell that has a bunch
of external manipulators and sensors and you have to drop your operating
system in to it. Then the cells are let lose in an arena to do batlle
for limited resources with each other. Last cell standing wins.New cells will be allowed to do battle only with the current top
contender. - (21) Cleanux
A drop-in replacement for the linux kernel based on a micro
kernel OS. - (22) ClosedClub
A very exclusive online club, membership $10K per year, otherwise
just a forum with read-only access for the rest of the world. - (23) clustercompute
A specialty newsletter/forum with anything and everything about
cluster computing. - (24) CodelNet
A simple content delivery network with an even simpler interface
(rsync).This got built and is in daily use.
- (25) CustomCrawl
A service that generates reports based on search engine results
that go the extra mile based on your query. A nicely formatted
PDF with the merged information found in the first 10 pages of
google results for a fee, complete with facts check and a list
of recommended extra reading an source pointers. - (26) Daz
The digital audio zone, anything that helps to find you new music.
- (27) DeadMansKnob
A service that will perform actions if you don't check in to the
site once per day, week and month. After 3 months a special
one time action will be triggered that will assume that you're
dead or in a persistent vegetative state and your account will
be terminated to prevent abuse.StavrosK pointed out that this now exists:
- (28) Drive-inn
A place where djs can line up to play music for an audience,
several 'streams' are made available for different styles. - (29) E404
A place where everything that's lost on the web is preserved.
- (30) exes4all
A place where you can 'evaluate' your former significant other.
- (31) F5News
New news whenever you hit 'F5' for an endless supply of stuff to read about.
Whatever you've read gets dropped, stuff older than 24 hours gets dropped.
News to be filtered based on user preferences and a detailed profile that
you flesh out over time. - (32) FossBounty
A place where you can incentivize Free software authors to do your bit,
we take a pre-auth for x days on someones credit card, you get to build
the bit they've asked for, we evaluate and if it's good you get the
dough and they get the wares which are then of course available for
the rest of the world as well. - (33) FreeVod
Free Video On Demand, a place where you can use the camera in your laptop
and a flash app to create a video which is then instantly available for
viewing by the rest of the world. - (34) Fwilter
A twitter monitoring service that you can pre-set with regexps or wild
carded fragments of texts that you want to be alerted about when they
occur in tweets. - (35) genalign
Very fast genetic sequence alignment. This could be layered on
top of AWS. - (36) GrassRootsBoycott
A place where consumers can unite against businesses, if a consumer has a verified
problem with a business and they think they're in the right they can upload all
the relevant documentation to the site, a vote is taken and if the vote is
accepted that company will be boycotted by all the members of the site until the
situation is resolved. The sting is that the people that boycott the company
will all list their receipts from the past months of $ spent with the company
so they can see the direct impact on their bottom line. - (37) HackerBacker
You're a coder with a bunch of free time, we give you an idea + the funds to
go and execute it, we'll take a minority share in return. - (38) HackerContests
Every week on a fixed day a new challenge is released, solutions will be
judged by correctness and performance. - (39) HardHacks
A place to show off your real world hardware hacking skills.
- (40) mXchg
A combined media exchange and player platform, it will automatically exchange
music and video files with other media exchanges instead of on a file-by-file
basis as with other peer to peer networks. Basically wholesale file exchange.The software uses audio fingerprinting ahead of the transfers to make sure
that it does not download stuff that it already has.This has been built and is working quite well but I'm sure it can be improved
upon.The RIAAs worst nightmare, a media exchanging darknet that only exchanges
files between friends. - (41) NonStarter
The starterless engine, simply use the positioning information from the
crank encoder to figure out which piston can be fired, inject a bit of
fuel, spark and go. This would save some weight on every vehicle, a
bunch of copper (expensive) and a part that fails at least several
times over the life-span of a car. It would also do away with the
problem of draining your car battery until it is flat, and it might
allow a reduction in car battery capacity. - (42) NoSeo
A search engine that will drop any site that has been search engine
optimized. - (43) NotFb
A place for facebook hold-outs or people that have left FaceBook for
whatever reason. - (44) OnTvNow
A place where people can stream feeds from their favorite TV programs
for others that are not in a location where the feed can be seen
normally. Big time legal trouble with that one! - (45) OpenPapers
A place where all academic research that has been funded in part by
public funds is published, journals be damned. Hopefully with deep
pockets to fight off the lawsuits. - (46) OptInSpam
A place where you can drop your email address and a bunch of fields
that you are interested in. People that wish to spam you would have
to go through us, we will evaluate their message and if we think it
is 'good enough' we tag it and we'll send it out to matching
contacts. - (47) p2pcluster
A place where you can rent out your cycles on your home pc
- (48) ProofItWasThere
A service where you can dump a url, we make a screenshot of the page
and give you a link back to the screenshot. Certification notices
for a fee. - (49) Registrate
A place where you register the serial numbers of all your devices
so that if you get robbed you can alert the insurance company
of your loss with the right information and so that it becomes
harder to re-sell your stuff on places like ebay. - (50) SequenceHunter
An application where you select a genome and then you can cut & paste
a dna fragment in to the ui and it will highlight instantly all the
locations where that fragment is found. Modifying the fragment
will give real time feedback as well, so if you shorten the sequence
you should see more locations light up and if you lengthen it the
number of locations will go down. Match mode includes exact match
or 'fuzzy' match with a percentage of the basebairs being allowed
to be 'wrong'. To make the Genome more interactive, probably not
very useful ;) - (51) SideEffectInfo
Information about each and every medicine, foodstuff or chemical
and what the effects on your body will/may be when you use it in the
short, mid and longer term. - (52) SoftBricks
Bricks that contain software components that you can connect just
like lego pieces. Smaller bricks can be composited in to larger
ones, composite sets of bricks can be 'cloned' in to a single
'new' brick. Brick pins can be inputs using a protocol, a level,
an edge or an analog value, ditto outputs. Specialized bricks
would allow interfacing to real world stuff at higher voltages
and currents than bricks can handle directly.Bricks can be composited in to computing fabrics where data
flows from one brick to the next in a pipeline like fashion,
and where bricks can cause the bricks near them to be
reprogrammed to modify their function. - (53) Spam-P
Checks to see if link content has been the payload of spam.
- (54) SunPower
A solar concentrator made up from flat mirrors driven by a single motor to
concentrate the light from the sun on to a single stationary receiver.The receiver could be a conventional solar cell arrangement (which would
have to be cooled and so would produce hot water as well for a very
respectable efficiency), or a ceramic plate with water tubes running
through it using a ram-jet like system of valves to flash water in to
steam driving a small turbine. - (55) SysAdminWiki
A place where system administrators can congregate and share their
knowledge, tips and tricks for various systems. - (56) TorrentLeaks
A variation on the wikileaks theme where you upload a bunch of files, the
service makes a torrent which is then announced and deleted exactly
24 hours later (after enough others have downloaded the torrent it should
stay alive if it is 'hot' enough). That way there is nothing to sue and
no single point of failure. The software to re-implement the site would
be available for download and people would be encouraged to set up more
of these 'drop off points'. Good luck playing whack-a-mole. - (57) UrlSpotter
A place where you can drop your links after you've seen something nice and where
you can vote on the links posted by others. Sounds familiar ;) ? - (58) vm4rent
A business that rents out VM instances.
- (59) WebCamPlanet
Proving ground for new stuff that I'm too scared to try on the main website
but that might have merit, if something is found that works well the main
website will get it and webcamplanet will *lose* it. Rinse, repeat. - (60) WeWatch
A service that watches over your property remotely and alerts you if something
is wrong or has changed according to parameters that you set. So, for instance
you could point a camera at an object, identify the object using the site
UI and call for an alert if it was moved or missing. - (61) wwgrapevine
A web app that shows a vine of grapes at the top of your screen, whenever a
new URL gets posted a bunch of grapes appears. Bunches are colour coded
(red:breaking news, green:humor, orange:you should probably read this and
so on). When clicking on a grape bunch the bunch lands on a plate and
you're taken to the site. If you click the plate you get a bunch of
options (like, dislike where 'like' will pass the bunch on to your
followers and where dislike will reduce the chance it gets passed on
at all).This was actually implemented and worked quite well but I never really
followed through on it. - (62) wwspeech
A free-speech speakers corner on the web where you can make a 5 minute
pitch about anything that you think matters.
If you got this far then you have a lot of patience :)
Questions about any of these or remarks: j@ww.com or http://twitter.com/jmattheij
If you implement any of them I'd like to hear about it! (especially if you make a bundle ;) ).
If you read this far you should 