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Project Ideas

I am a man who, from time to time, is given to ideas.  Are they any good? I don’t know. Most of them are terrible. At any rate, here they are for the world to see.

  • Cloud service for application synchronization
  • tasting notes
    • an app to record food and drinks that you’ve had, and your comments about them. Useful to recall that cheese you had 3 years ago, or to find what your friends have enjoyed.
  • inbox zero
    • gamification of getting to inbox zero.
  • moviesect – find movies in which a set of actors played
    • in which moves have Johnny Depp & Tim Burton been involved?
  • unix command output in json. ie `echo”hello”`:”{‘command’: ‘echo’, ‘exit_code’: 0, ‘stdout’: ‘hello’}.
  • Betting app
    • bet on anything with imaginary dollars. involve your friends. compete for highest score (cash).
  • Lyrics search engine which confines search to bands/songs you’ve listened to (via last.fm/pandora)
  • Safe, exclusive place to post project ideas. Selected people may voice an interest to collaborate on any idea
  • twitter sentiment analysis: find the general mood of people in your stream
  • Regex the dictionary
    • great for cheating at scrabble?
  • sign up to every website that has free registration with a unique email address. See which addresses get spam. publish this list
    • may have been done before
  • Hatebox
    • Name something you hate about a product you use
    • (this idea must have come during a period of particular frustration)
  • wrapper to provide uniform interface for all VCSs
  • KeyValueSter
    • Social database (??).
    • schema-free details about yourself.
    • (I must have been drunk).
  • better news.yc twitter notifier. add source domain, comment link
  • Service for finding friends on twitter.
    • Looks for things in common between members (i.e. use wefollow tags and possibly social graph).
    • Introduces the two people in hope of sparking friendship
  • Graph communities on twitter. Looks at connections but only count conversations as edges. Try to find discrete social circles.
    • (was wondering if there was an alternate tech-scene in SF I didn’t know about).
  • Follow iCal feeds and tweet reminders
  • twitter rss monitor
    • a bot to notify users over twitter when a feed they follow updates.
    • WIP: https://github.com/mwhooker/Tweed
  • Why is this person following me on twitter?
    • who do they follow that follow me?
    • who follows them that I follow?
    • all important questions that I tried to answer with https://github.com/mwhooker/whyisthispersonfollowingme
  • Standards for nonstandard thing.
    • Example: bathrooms. Sink faucet should leave adequate room for hands. Build or recommend sets of faucets/sinks which work well together. If build, make them like Ikea furniture: nothing which goes together poorly should physically fit. Build brand around certification.
  • Problem: no one really knows how much they’re worth. Build a tool to figure this out.
    • Perhaps a network of companies which agree to rate candidates they’ve interviewed in exchange for market info on candidates.
    • Examples of problem:
      • Candidate has (intelligence, skill, enthusiasm, etc.) impedance mismatch with interviewers. Candidate will not fit in at company. Help candidate find company he’d fit well in
  • google app engine configuration management app. use HTTP for config. XML (with types) data format. user interface. Configuration should be a tree with inheritance. version config
  • browser plugin to record every page you visit for easy search later.