Public Ideas
Dave Emmett posted a new idea: Email Catcher
There are some web apps (and people) that send a lot of email. In some cases, this email is actually important, but the rate it comes in at makes it extremely difficult to manage. I'd like to create what would basically be a staging ground between when email is sent to me, and when I receive it: I'd therefore be able to control when I want to deal with the email messages I know come in at a high frequency. It could work by being an add-on to rules in email: all the messages you select (from notification@webapp.com) go to a folder/label, but skip the inbox, then they all get added to the inbox at a certain time. Or maybe something else, an actual intermediary between incoming email and my inbox.
There are a few examples from my own email experience that have made me have this idea:
— my gf and I are looking for a condo. We get emails automatically from our real estate agent that give us info on houses that might be interesting to us, but they come in so often that I made a rule for them to leave my inbox automatically. Great, but now I forget that I even receive it, so I never look at them. I want to receive them all (or, even better, a email digest that pulls all of them into one message) on maybe saturday, when we can sit down and review them.
— our work ticketing system generates an inordinate amount of email. Ticket updated, ticket assigned, ticket resolved, ticket re-opened, ticket commented on...it's a wonder people get any work done with all the email about the work they're doing. Instead, I want to tell my email catcher thingy to stop all emails from tickets until certain times in the day (beginning, middle, and end, maybe), so I can review them in batches with a bit of context of what the big picture is. Maybe the ticketing app should build something like that into their tool: but I want to be able to manage apps that don't come with built in advanced email control.
Useful?
The Interactive Design lab at CapU used to have a kettle, then the second years left and the kettle went with them. The kettle got lots of use from the first years, and people were vocal about their displeasure with it's disappearance.
If there was a website to raise funds for a new kettle there would surely be interest from the ID group! It could accept payments through PayPal, and present several different kettles as options. People would vote for a kettle, and their vote would be weighted according to the sum of their donation (to a maximum of say, $5.)
This might be a good side project this summer. It would ensure much tea drinking during the next two semesters.
Dave Emmett posted a new idea: youtube karaoke
This might exist.
There are tons of great original songs on youtube that people love to sing along to.
Karaoke is a great way of singing along to things.
Ergo: There should be a way to sing karaoke (have the background music but not the lyrics, and have captioning) to youtube videos.
Really I just want this so I can sing along to Julien Smith's I'm Reading a Book
The amount of unredeemed gift card pennies has to be astronomical.
How many of us have had a Starbucks card with 8 cents on it that was never redeemed or is still in your wallet.
Why not drop boxes on retailer counters that people can drop these small denomination gift card leftovers in? Then all of the money raised from these drop boxes could be cycled back into local community charities and initiatives.
Even better if the card could be swiped before dropping into the box - telling you how much has currently been raised at this location etc ...
This couldn't be that difficult to do.
When you take a photo with this app (or upload one from your library), it would combine it with the last photo taken by another user of the app and produce a double exposure. Both you and the original photo taker would receive this new photo. This would be fun because you would never know what kind of photo the next/last person would submit, so the results could be pretty unique. Users would be able to share their newly combined photos with social networks, and see other photos taken by the person whose photo their photo was combined with.
A few scope creep ideas would be to track location for the photos and give badges for things like 'longest distance between photos', 'shortest distance between photos', or 'in the same city/country'.
I think it would be fun.
Adding articles to Instapaper one at a time is so 2010. I'm envisioning a way for authors to create bundles of links that a user could click on to add all the links to instapaper at once.
This idea came out of a blog post I wrote a few months ago: http://davemmett.tumblr.com/post/1519617100/responsive-design-links
It's mostly a list of helpful links about Responsive Web Design, but if someone wants to read all the articles they have to open each one, read it now, or save it for later. Since the type of person who opens a link to a Responsive Web Design article is clearly using Instapaper, it would be helpful to be able to add all of those links to their instapaper at once.
Useful?
Ross Emmett posted a new idea: Facebook SCAPM
Presenter at the Berle II conference just suggested an app which would calculate your social capital on the basis of your Facebook network. He wanted to call it the Facebook Social Capital Asset Pricing Model.
Allow groups of strangers to book charter jets collectively when enough people want to travel to the same place. Sort of groupon for air travel, except it wouldn't just be a cheaper flight on an airline, it would be it's own airline. Clearly, this is way too large scale for me to launch, but I think it's time for the airline industry to be disrupted using new technology.
With a minute to go before New Years last night it occurred to us we had no plan for how to countdown to the new year. I think it would be easy/fun to make a countdown app that tells you how long into New Years, and then maybe shows a video of fireworks going off after midnight. Obviously this could be used for other countdowns as well as New Years, but I think it would be more fun to build something that is specifically for New Years (might be hard to test though, since it's only useful once a year).
Most Seinfeld episodes would be 10 seconds long if they were based today, mainly because so many of the problems they have in the show just don't exist anymore. They all split up to look for the car, and then they can't find each other. If they had iPhones they would just text and reconnect. And George would have taken a photo of where they were parked, so they wouldn't even have to look. Not entirely sure how to work this into a narrative structure (screengrabs? animated gifs? recut the video?) but it would be pretty funny.