

Ask HN. Torn between two ideas. - teamplaya

I have funding and a group of individual to work with. I have two ideas,
1. A calendar app
2. Social bookmarking
Both with a simple and minimal look and feel. iOS/Android app and web app.
I don't know which to choose to develop, they both really excite us. 
What would you choose. 1 or 2 ?
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DanBC
I'm not sure how you could make social bookmarking different enough from
existing products to be interesting and useful. One idea would be to have
topics to which people suggest links; no one person owns any board or topic.
That means that if I want any information about chairs I go to the chairs
topic, and there they all are. i don't have to follow eight different people
who have a chairs board and who may be posting similar links. Add in some kind
of voting and you then have a directory of trusted (but, obviously, it's
exploitable) links.

Calendars and diaries could be made useful. There are a huge number of very
similar calendaring / diary softwares, and they all have similar limited
functionality. I'd want something that made it really really easy to add stuff
to; when someone emails me I want to be able to select and right-click some
text and have that parsed and added to a calendar. I don't need to break my
days into 15 minute segments. I want to be able to view the next week, or
month, or whatever, per page.

~~~
m_marker
Regarding the Social bookmarking app, we want to take a recommendation system
appoach, so we set the boards, and as new content gets posted, we fetch the
content on the content recommendation engine we post it to a particular board.
Users can then suscribe to boards and get content in realtime. A user can
either vote up/down the content and we coulde use it to train and get the user
preference.

~~~
weeny
have you ever seen this site: reddit.com

~~~
teamplaya
Yes, but reddit doesn't have a live recommendation system? The posts are
ranked based on user votes

~~~
weeny
It's fundamentally a live recommendation system, and those votes make it work
better than anything else (see Digg). I click on a subreddit and I get
recommendations for related pages.

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alexobenauer
I think the calendar space isn't nearly as flooded as social bookmarking.

The most interesting proponent I've seen in the calendar space is
[TouchBase]([http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchbase-
calendar-1-touch/id...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchbase-
calendar-1-touch/id472072883?mt=8)).

I haven't seen a social bookmarking proponent that I really liked, and
something like Instagram for links would be really interesting. I say this
because it's not a social sharing app that blasts everything you do out to
your entire social network on facebook (unless you set it to), and you don't
automatically follow every one of your friends that's on Instagram. That's
really nice, because the apps that make those assumptions are immediately
filled with garbage from those with whom I have not interacted in years.

I'm sure you already have your ideas, but I figured I'd throw this out there
for you to add to your melting pot of responses.

~~~
adamtaa
Actually, I have an alpha social bookmarking product that is something like
this. The home page is crap and I am in the midst of something else so I can
get to it for a week. but it has the features you mention. I have been keeping
it under wraps but if you want to crawl around in it for fun its located at
www.markmyplace.com. feedback appreciated.

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AznHisoka
I'd choose neither. I either build something that businesses would buy, or
something that would attracts lots and lots of users in a non-saturated market
so I can sell advertising. None of those 2 fits the bill.

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tzaman
You really shouldn't "think" which one is better here. Do your homework,
analyze the market, do the math and let the numbers tell you which one is the
better pick.

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brudgers
The calendar, like email, could stand replacement/reinvention.

I don't know what I would do with a social bookmarking app (but I'm not all
that hip).

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weeny
Why not both?

~~~
hboon
At the same time? Focus and time is limited.

~~~
weeny
No, combine the two played ideas into one novel idea. It's called synthesis,
thats what constitutes innovation...

~~~
teamplaya
Don't you think it would be better to focus on one, get it working really well
then we can expand. All these companies started with a small focused idea

~~~
weeny
I'm talking about one focused idea. I dont want to do your homework for you
guys but think "temporal social bookmarking" - social bookmarking and calendar
app have a baby. Otherwise you're just rehashing Google Calendar and/or Digg.

