Idea #9: Site to Track ‘Like’ for Any Web Page

like/hate button tweet from @podlabs

With Facebook now offering a Like button for web sites which posts back to Facebook and helps with ad targeting…there’s a giant sucking sound towards Facebook (to paraphrase Ross Perot).

But I think there’s a lot of value in collating people’s likes/hates/mehs for any web page out there on the Internet, regardless of Facebook’s plans.

Maybe it’s just me.

UPDATE: A couple of people have pointed me to http://openlike.org/ . Neat idea. What I am talking about is building a site (like a StumbleUpon, I guess), which collates likes/hates/mehs for the entire web. This site could accept logins from Twitter, Facebook, others, so that it leverages existing networks.

Known Implementations: None

Resources for iPhone and iPad Development

As I am learning iPhone/Touch/iPad development, I’ve come across some useful sites along the way and I’ll share them here in the hope that they are useful to others.

Please let me know your favorite resources in the comments. I plan to keep the post updated as new goodness becomes available!

Idea #8: Audiobooks Marketplace for Public Domain Works

First thought was … there’s so much great content out there, I’d love it if someone would make it podcast ready. Sure, I can turn on Text-to-Speech on my Mac and grab out an audio file of a particular work…hey, blog posts even…but then you have the small problem of copyright. It would be neat to create a whole model around paying publishers for their original content and whenever a derivative work is created, they somehow get a kickback. Maybe that’s bigger than I’d want to bite off…but maybe someone does. Secondly, having Fred (or his female counterpart) read a title might be good for a few laughs, but consuming a whole book that may just may be a path to insanity.

So in trying to solve these two problems (copyright and automation), I had the thought…

    What if we created a marketplace where, Mechanical Turk style, people do readings (dramatic, humorous, straight-laced…whatever) of public domain works. The payment would come from people paying pennies for these enjoyable readings of old works, the marketplace would keep a small percentage, and the readers would be incentivized to record themselves as they would take a piece of every download. Maybe whole books are too long. Perhaps break it down by chapter.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Now think about this for a minute…you’re in high school and you have to read…I dunno…Grapes of Wrath or something….where Steinbeck goes on for 2 pages about dust. Would you rather read those two pages or would you rather have some bored high school kid from Anytown, USA looking to make a little money on the side do a dramatic reading of those two pages for you?

Thoughts? 🙂

This just in from Willie Abrams:
willie suggests Librivox as a public domain audio marketplace

Known Implementations: None

Related:

  • LibriVox (seems to be pretty much what I am describing, but without the commercial aspect)

Idea #7: “Twitter Answers”

We all know that conversations on Twitter can be confusing to follow.

Here’s a small example that I posted on Skitch awhile back:

Confusing Twitter replies 'show conversation' example

    Part of the problem is that the original tweet isn’t shown. But the times seem to make little sense at first glance. It requires a Math minor at least to figure out what’s going on and this is a simple example.

Ben Hamill of Austin on Rails built a site to make the reply chain a little simpler to follow called atreply.net. You enter a particular tweet and it shows the reply chain.

Joshua Schachter (of Delicious fame) built something interesting for having a focused conversation about a single topic (with the option of just having the discussion over there and not on Twitter) called A Tiny Thread.

Here are a couple of examples of conversations that I wish I could have saved:

bmizerany tweet about a public conversation thread

joestump comment about a thread he's been having with markimbriaco

Hopefully Twitter will fix conversation viewing as one of those much discussed holes to be filled in the future. It’s really surprising to me that it is still so difficult.

So here’s the idea (sort of related, but a bit different). I’m sure this exists in some form at this point, please let me know in the comments. A good implementation really needs to exist.

You know how somebody will ask a question like: “What are the best action movies of all time? I want to watch one tonight on Netflix.”

Maybe i respond to the person or go back and do a search and try to look for some answers. The person may or may not group them together and actually “post them back to the list”.

So what this site would do is… given a “question tweet” provided by your users… the site would go and find all the answers, pull them out and display them (with references) to the original tweets. So you could have people give you an explicit question tweet or maybe in the future, you could actually poll the public timeline looking for tweets that end in a question mark. Of course, that’s harder to get right and would be error-prone.

Now, once a question has been incorporated into the site, then you could actually have people Digg-style up or downvote the answers. This is also optional, but it may also give you a more relevant answer list. You could also have a button like “this is a bad answer” or “this is irrelevant”, and throw it out if enough people mark it as such. With some user moderation, this could become a very interesting collection of questions and answers, all sourced from Twitter.

So like Yahoo! Answers, but with Twitter data. You wouldn’t have to be a member of the site to partcipate or explicitly mention the site in any way. People would suggest question tweets, sorta like Tweeting Too Hard, and the site would collate the answers from there.

Thoughts?

Known Implementations: None (please tell me this exists!)

Related:
(Found these in the “Find answers to your questions” section of this Twitter post. Two of the sites linked in that post are parked pages (either went defunct or never even launched).

  • Lazy Tweet (this is close, but I don’t think it should need to be explicit)
  • Twitter Answers (powered by Mosio) (seems to be a Twitter piece tacked on to a more generic mobile question answer site. Interesting.
  • Vark (mentioned by @safesolvent on Twitter – yes, Vark is very cool and wow, acquired by Google (available now in Google Labs). As I understand it (but I haven’t actually used the site), you ask questions on Vark’s site rather than Twitter, but you can probably tweet your question / answer. Still not quite what I am talking about, which is completely Twitter-based and does not require you mention or go to another site to be a part of it)
  • ThinkTank – open source answers platform from Gina Tripani of LifeHacker. Seems interesting, but is way more than what I am looking for. It does a lot of Twitter analytics on you / your friends, it appears. Still, a neat project.
  • InboxQ – Q&A for Twitter with focus on brands, allows tweeting from Chrome extension (Techcrunch article) (added 2/17/2011)
  • Replyz – “Collects and amplifies questions from around the web, allowing a wider audience to answer them.” (added 2/17/2011)
  • Tweettion – Completely Twitter-based Q&A site (added 5/14/2011)

Btw, I’m really embarrassed (on the inside) about how long it’s taken me to write/post this. I gave this idea to Ben Hamill (since he wrote AtReply.net, I thought he might be interested in building it) about 6 months ago. I’m trying to be better about posting ideas more regularly.

Idea #6: Gift Cards for the Homeless

We’re often confronted with people who are asking for money at the corner of an intersection. Personally, while I feel bad for the person, I am reluctant to give them straight cash because a) I don’t know that they will use it for food or something else that they really need rather than alcohol and b) I don’t want to encourage them to stand on corners asking for money. I have no idea what someone who does that kind of thing makes in a day. Probably many factors come into play in that equation.

Some people offer up straight food or drink and that is good if the person is really hungry or thirsty at that moment. Of course, the less perishable the gift is, the better.

In thinking about possible alternatives to the problem, I came up with the idea of forming a non-profit whose whole goal is to raise money to help the homeless, but also actually help the homeless too. You include the homeless person in the loop more tightly by giving them gift cards, which are redeemable at any participating homeless shelters in the metro area which the non-profit is serving.

Here’s how it would work. You hear about this program and think it’s a great idea. You go to giftcardsforthehomeless.com (ok, that’s not a real domain) and you make a $20 donation. A set of gift cards is then sent to this caring soul in the mail. They throw a few of these cards into their purse or wallet and the next time someone asks them for money and they determine they want to help them out, they hand them a gift card. They explain that they can take it to any of the homeless shelters on the back of the card to get extra stuff. When they exchange the gift card for stuff at the shelter, the shelter then has a touchpoint to try to help that person. The collected card would then be “turned in” to the non-profit, in exchange for a cash donation to help cover the cost of the extra help they are giving.

This is cool for a number of reasons…here are a few that quickly come to mind:

  • The card is portable so they can easily stuff it away in their pocket or bag and take it with them for later when they are needing some help.
  • You’re giving them something of value to them but without the risk that they’ll burn your dollars on a couple of 40s. This will help those of us who don’t feel quite right giving straight cash.
  • Having the card encourages them to seek help from an organization set up to help people in their situation.
  • The card is something tangible for them to hold onto and not spend immediately. Saving money when you’re in dire straits must be incredibly difficult to do. Perhaps having a gift card would be easier to hold onto.

Perhaps you can think of other reasons why it’s good or bad? Does anyone know of programs out there today that work like this? How do you handle homeless folks who approach you for money, either while you’re in your car or walking down the street downtown?

If you have feedback on the idea, please let me know in the comments.

Known Implementations: None.

Updates:
A similar concept (using food gift cards instead of money), but without the shelter part from Ian Warshak:
iwarshak: @damon neat idea. we recently started giving the homeless gift cards to mcdonalds/whataburger instead of cash.

Twitter API User Bulk Lookup!

UPDATE: Of course you’ll need to upgrade to do the OAuth dance now to make these calls. Back when this post was written, the HTTP Basic Authentication option was still available to developers.

The Twitter API Team introduced a new method this evening that will be incredibly useful.

You can now batch user lookups by username or ID with one call:

$ curl -u username:password
  "https://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.xml
  ?user_id=756264,10145822"

or

$ curl -u username:password 
  "https://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.xml
  ?user_name=damon,podlabs"

both return:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<users type=”array”>
<user>
<id>756264</id>
<name>Damon Clinkscales</name>
<screen_name>damon</screen_name>
<location>Austin, TX</location>
<description>Father. Husband. Friend. Connector. Helper. Programmer. VitalSource. Podlabs. Austin on Rails.  Cafe Bedouins. SnapTweet. DoesFollow. WhereBeYou.</description>
<profile_image_url>http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/561257818/mo5_crop_normal.jpg</profile_image_url>
<url>http://blog.damonc.com</url>
<protected>false</protected>
<followers_count>1436</followers_count>
<profile_background_color>ec2727</profile_background_color>
<profile_text_color>051014</profile_text_color>
<profile_link_color>1b3c5f</profile_link_color>
<profile_sidebar_fill_color>AF2C2C</profile_sidebar_fill_color>
<profile_sidebar_border_color>F2E195</profile_sidebar_border_color>
<friends_count>500</friends_count>
<created_at>Wed Feb 07 19:41:27 +0000 2007</created_at>
<favourites_count>138</favourites_count>
<utc_offset>-21600</utc_offset>
<time_zone>Central Time (US &amp; Canada)</time_zone>
<profile_background_image_url>http://s.twimg.com/a/1268246301/images/themes/theme2/bg.gif</profile_background_image_url>
<profile_background_tile>false</profile_background_tile>
<notifications>true</notifications>
<geo_enabled>false</geo_enabled>
<verified>false</verified>
<following>true</following>
<statuses_count>14879</statuses_count>
<lang>en</lang>
<contributors_enabled>false</contributors_enabled>
<status>
<created_at>Thu Mar 11 07:33:18 +0000 2010</created_at>
<id>10312311768</id>
<text>Damon, what are you doing up, you may ask…why, I’m programming the @twitterapi. so far, our diabolical plan w/ the little one is &quot;working&quot;</text>
<source>&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atebits.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tweetie&lt;/a&gt;</source>
<truncated>false</truncated>
<in_reply_to_status_id></in_reply_to_status_id>
<in_reply_to_user_id></in_reply_to_user_id>
<favorited>false</favorited>
<in_reply_to_screen_name></in_reply_to_screen_name>
<geo/>
<coordinates/>
<place/>
<contributors/>
</status>
</user>
<user>
<id>10145822</id>
<name>Podlabs</name>
<screen_name>podlabs</screen_name>
<location>Austin, TX</location>
<description>Software ideas, realized.</description>
<profile_image_url>http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/744436899/PLtwitbig_normal.jpg</profile_image_url>
<url>http://podlabs.com</url>
<protected>false</protected>
<followers_count>13</followers_count>
<profile_background_color>131516</profile_background_color>
<profile_text_color>333333</profile_text_color>
<profile_link_color>009999</profile_link_color>
<profile_sidebar_fill_color>efefef</profile_sidebar_fill_color>
<profile_sidebar_border_color>eeeeee</profile_sidebar_border_color>
<friends_count>3</friends_count>
<created_at>Sun Nov 11 05:57:50 +0000 2007</created_at>
<favourites_count>0</favourites_count>
<utc_offset>-21600</utc_offset>
<time_zone>Central Time (US &amp; Canada)</time_zone>
<profile_background_image_url>http://s.twimg.com/a/1268246301/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif</profile_background_image_url>
<profile_background_tile>true</profile_background_tile>
<notifications></notifications>
<geo_enabled>false</geo_enabled>
<verified>false</verified>
<following></following>
<statuses_count>23</statuses_count>
<lang>en</lang>
<contributors_enabled>false</contributors_enabled>
<status>
<created_at>Wed Mar 10 17:02:41 +0000 2010</created_at>
<id>10279681545</id>
<text>@willie Oh, THAT Death Star. I was thinking about a different floating orb evil empire. I’m glad to hear you think it’s much improved.</text>
<source>&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atebits.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tweetie&lt;/a&gt;</source>
<truncated>false</truncated>
<in_reply_to_status_id>10278766590</in_reply_to_status_id>
<in_reply_to_user_id>796105</in_reply_to_user_id>
<favorited>false</favorited>
<in_reply_to_screen_name>willie</in_reply_to_screen_name>
<geo/>
<coordinates/>
<place/>
<contributors/>
</status>
</user>
</users>

Two issues come immediately to mind that this helps out with:

  1. Search API user ids still do not match REST API user ids. So with this, you could pull search results and map the screen name to the REST API user id. The fact that you can do this in bulk will save billions of calls. 🙂
  2. The so-called Social Graph methods, where you can pull a Twitter users’ friend list or following list as a big list of IDs are extremely useful, although they have, to date, only supported IDs in the responses. So with this new call, you could take a social graph of IDs and run them through this bulk lookup to get the screen name. Once you have the screen name, you can create links to the user’s twitter profile, for one thing. This bulk lookup also returns the entire User resource, so at that point you’ve got everything.

Great change. Nice work, Twitter API guys!

Help Me Pick a Logo

For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to develop a brand that is different than my personal brand for the work that I do building apps.  The applications I’ve created so far have been about building something that I wanted for myself and something that is useful.  SnapTweet was created as a way to easily bridge Flickr and Twitter for picture posting, DoesFollow (and now the Twitter List membership check) were built out of frustration with the inconvenience of Twitter’s interface for determining followership (especially with large follower counts).  Finally, WhereBeYou was a Cafe Bedouins evening hack to do the reverse geo lookup for accounts which set geo coordinates instead of city/state for the Twitter Location field.  I got tired of seeing geo coordinates and wondering…now where the hell are these people anyway…?

I’ve got a list of ideas, most of which have not yet been documented on my blog and a couple of these are under development.  As slow as the progress is sometimes, I know that I will continue to make more useful things as the years go on and I want to have a place to bring those things together under one name and that brand is Podlabs.  Any web apps that I build will have a branding stripe somewhere on the page saying something to the effect of “A Podlabs Production”.  My iPhone Developer Program registration for iPad and iPhone development is under Podlabs as well.

I’m working with Scott Butler of Scott Butler Design on the logo and together we’ve developed some mockups of a concept.  Originally, the POD in Podlabs was referring to iPod, as, back in 2005, I had the idea for a wine application for iPod (that required a companion Mac app).  These days, iPod has morphed into iPod Touch, iPhone, and the soon-to-be-released iPad, so the POD part needs to be more broad than just iPod.  I think the pod motif can still work as it suggests futuristic, space, sleek, self-contained, etc.   The current logo concept is a sleep pod looking thing with an electrical cord and connection point.  Below, I’ve included 7 different variations on the theme and I’d like to know what feedback you have on the choices.

podlabs logo #1

podlabs logo #1

podlabs logo #2

podlabs logo #2

podlabs logo #3

podlabs logo #3

podlabs logo #4

podlabs logo #4

podlabs logo #5

podlabs logo #5

podlabs logo #6

podlabs logo #6

podlabs logo #7

podlabs logo #7

Please select your top 3 favorites from the above 7 choices. Also, if there is a particular visual element or color which you particularly like or don’t like, I’d like to hear that as well.

Some examples of things to consider are:

  1. the outlines around the letter, versus no outline
  2. lowercase versus capital L
  3. ‘a’ sitting on top of ‘L’, instead of beside
  4. the pod
  5. the cord
  6. the font style and the feeling it evokes
  7. color schemes  (of those shown or is there some other scheme that might work well?)

What are your thoughts / feelings when you first look at it?

Thanks for your feedback!

Idea #5: A Marketplace for Gowalla Items

Perhaps you’ve heard of the location-based game call Gowalla.  Basically, you “check in” at places when you’re out and about and you find (or receive as bonus) virtual items for your pack.  When your pack gets too full, you can stow them away in your Collection.  It’s a fun way to keep up with your friends and what they are doing, as well.

Collecting items is pretty fun and sometimes hunting for a particular item can be a challenge. In some cases, you might even call it an Epic Quest™. Other times, people just make up strange games inside Gowalla like the time that several of us decided that we would fill up Sodade Coffehouse with Beatnik Poets.  I know that Allen Ginsberg is smiling down on Austin from above.

So the idea would be to help people find each other so they can swap items in Gowalla.   I may have items that you want and vice versa.  Or perhaps, I saw an item at a spot that’s near where you are, but you don’t know it’s there.

Another option is to sit at home in your underwear and use gowallatools (oddly, not affiliated with Gowalla) to find items, but what would be the fun in that?  😉 Then you wouldn’t get out and meet people to exchange items.   You wouldn’t get to check in aimlessly all over town looking for that elusive Longhorn (no, not the skull, mind you).

I don’t know that it’s worth trying to make a business off of this matchmaking process, but it would certainly be useful to have a site where you can specify your location and then it lists folks who have items to give and folks looking for specific items.  Of course, you could do this ad hoc over Twitter but it would get tiresome / laborious pretty fast if you did it too much.

Ok someone, please to be building this now. Thanks!

Update:

After having a conversation with Chris Carter today (4/8/2010), I realized there’s another aspect of this that could be interesting. I saw this item at…He mentioned to me that one of the items I am missing, he had just seen at a nearby spot a couple days ago (and it had been there for a couple weeks). That’s some very pertinent information for the dedicated item seeker! So, let’s add one more concept to the marketplace, leaving us with three different ways to match:

  • I have
  • I want
  • I saw

With the I saw, you don’t actually meet someone new in person, but it still gives people the opportunity to find items they are seeking and gives others the opportunity to help out. Some people, like Chris (and myself as well), enjoy helping people. But perhaps, you offer some gaming elements, reputation, points, etc. for when people make successful exchanges.

Known implementations: None

Related: