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jducoeurHere's a more serious project -- heck, maybe even a business in the vague Web 2.0 business sense. (That is, I'm not sure it has a real business plan, but I bet I could get a million bucks in seed capital to explore it.) It's inspired by my previous posting, a few minutes ago.
Generic socially-shared data. There are a bunch of sites that are about sharing a very specific kind of thing, usually in a fairly restricted way. del.icio.us lets you share bookmarks; Digg lets you share links; etc. But what I'm thinking here is a system that has a general DB architecture at its heart, rather than a specific app. The system lets you pull in flists from all your various social networks, as a number of current projects do, but goes further: it establishes data sharing among those social networks. The members of the service can define data types more or less at will; you can choose to define whatever data you want within those data types, and automatically share them with all of your friends.
So the online dictionary I described a few minutes ago would be a special case of this. There would be a dictionary-word schema, and a Firefox plugin. The plugin talks to the APIs of the service, letting you add and query for words. All of your machines could share this dictionary, as could all of your friends. Between us, my flist would probably have every bit of SCA jargon defined in that shared dictionary in about three days.
Basically, it's a conceptual mashup between the new meta-social-network tools people are working on, and GoogleBase. No idea what other kinds of apps it would be used for, but I'd bet that a hundred could be thought up in reasonably short order, especially if you combined it with a mechanism for building sites based on that data. And I have no idea at all how to monetize the damned thing, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people with interesting ideas at the moment. Rather neat -- I'll have to stick that onto my "to explore" list...
Generic socially-shared data. There are a bunch of sites that are about sharing a very specific kind of thing, usually in a fairly restricted way. del.icio.us lets you share bookmarks; Digg lets you share links; etc. But what I'm thinking here is a system that has a general DB architecture at its heart, rather than a specific app. The system lets you pull in flists from all your various social networks, as a number of current projects do, but goes further: it establishes data sharing among those social networks. The members of the service can define data types more or less at will; you can choose to define whatever data you want within those data types, and automatically share them with all of your friends.
So the online dictionary I described a few minutes ago would be a special case of this. There would be a dictionary-word schema, and a Firefox plugin. The plugin talks to the APIs of the service, letting you add and query for words. All of your machines could share this dictionary, as could all of your friends. Between us, my flist would probably have every bit of SCA jargon defined in that shared dictionary in about three days.
Basically, it's a conceptual mashup between the new meta-social-network tools people are working on, and GoogleBase. No idea what other kinds of apps it would be used for, but I'd bet that a hundred could be thought up in reasonably short order, especially if you combined it with a mechanism for building sites based on that data. And I have no idea at all how to monetize the damned thing, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people with interesting ideas at the moment. Rather neat -- I'll have to stick that onto my "to explore" list...