Three app ideas (well, just two)

November 30, 2006

I was brainstorming with the guys at work the other day and came up with three variations on an original idea, and thought I’d post them here as food for thought.  If I can flesh any of these out, I may develop it/them.

Centralized reviews

A site where people post reviews of things - anything from the standard CDs/books/movies to local theater, sport events, concerts, whatever.  A user can then post these reviews to one or more sites which would be appropriate (standard social network sites, media sites like Yahoo, Amazon and MSN, etc).  By having to write just once, but being able to publish and republish to multiple places easily, this would facilitate more participation from those who don’t want to register and log in to multiple sites.  Alternatively, sites looking for content could syndicate reviews by tags (direct monetization is difficult in that model).  All reviews could be explicitly creative commons licensed.

Downsides

To log in to sites on someone’s behalf would currently require either using their ID/password, or creating review-only accounts on each service.  Having a user give the central service their user/pass is a big risk, and not many people would do it.  Creating ‘review-only’ accounts would mean that people wouldn’t be able to be associated with any current reviews they have already published at the various destination sites.

One-stop community signup

Something I’ve noticed for a long time is that people hate signup forms.  I’ve been interested in trying new services I read about a techcrunch.com (for example), but hate having to deal with yet another user/pass/email/click-to-activate-account process.  A central service could eliminate much of this by automating my signup to new services.

Users sign up at ‘onestop’, and fill out a small profile of interests/geography/etc.  Sites looking for new members (for testers or just regular users) can register their interest in reaching users meeting certain criteria (dog owners in NY, college kids, etc).  Users would be pinged once with an invite to the selected community.  If they accept the invite, the user’s info is programatically sent to the site, registered with the user’s email/random_pass/selected_username, and because the user would have been ‘verified’ by the ‘onestop’ service already, they can skip that step.

Downside

May require community owners to modify their signup process to be more programmatic.  Would need some specs on what the POST would look like (SOAP? XMLRPC?).  Users may want to use different emails for different communities (need to make it easy).  Would probably need to track user/pass/emails used for different signups from a service standpoint, but maybe not from a security standpoint.

No #3 (yet)

Well, I can’t remember what #3 was supposed to be - it’s late, so I’ll have to ping the guys at work to see what #3 was (which, IIRC, was really #1 in the conversation).

Any thoughts on these ideas, comment here or email me privately at mgkimsal@gmail.com

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