I've been thinking about this idea over the past few days. I've even already written code for it and have a functional prototype. But, everyone I tell the idea to doesn't seem to grasp the concept or just can't see why it would be useful. I was even told that I "could achieve more" by looking for new ideas, lol.
My idea is simple and came to me in a simple manner. The idea is this - a hosted database service (a la MongoHQ) with an easy and highly accessible CRUD interface via SMTP (a la Posterous).
The idea came to me while thinking about writing my own SMTP-based blog, like Posterous. I wanted to write my own blog that I was able to write to using any email client I had, instead of using some annoying WYSIWYG editor. I'd just use Markdown for formatting. But then a friend suggested, "why not generalize it for more than just blogs"? I'm not sure to what extent he meant, but I immediately envisioned something similar to Posterous but much much more generalized. Basically, a database that anyone could perform CRUD on using their email client.
Why email? Everyone has it. It's easily accessible. It doesn't take much explanation. There are email client implementations in pretty much every environment you can think of.
It obviously wouldn't be for heavy read/write traffic database applications, but more for casual users that don't fully understand the internal workings of how to use their own database. It could perhaps be used by myself to write my own Posterous-esque blogging platform. It could be used for email storage and backup. It could be use for file sharing, backing up files with associated meta data. A simple API could provide non-SMTP read access to your data - perhaps REST.
I feel like this idea excites me because of two reasons, A) it has a clear cut hosting-based business plan and B) I don't even know if I fully know how this is entirely useful or what the applications of it could be. I haven't gotten very good feedback on it, though. So, to exercise some of what I've read about lean startups and just throwing your ideas out there, I figure I'll see what you guys think about this?
Here is what I have running for it so far. It's just something I wrote in a single afternoon as kind of a proof of concept for myself. I wrote a simple SMTP server that does nothing but handling incoming emails and performs some simple, crude authentication on them. Authentication is done by signing up on the site, downloading the provided "db.auth" file. To submit data to the database, address an email to "db@collabreate.co" and attach the "db.auth" file. The records will appear on the website. There is no other functionality in this demo.
http://collabreate.co:8080/records/
You have to include the /records/ otherwise it won't load anything. It's port 8080 because it's running on my home fios connection. The domain is just something I use to play with - it's not related to this particular idea.
So, what do you all think? :P
As for this generic crud service. I think the problem is, just as you don't know how it could be useful, neither do others. A hosted db would be useful through an API, but communicating with email programmatically is probably a larger overhead compared to a standard GET or POST request.