
Idea dump, December edition - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/idea+dump%2C+December+edition
======
weego
(69) The Never Ending Story

I came up with and specced out something like this for a school which never
got passed the planning stage. The idea was more simple in that there was a
seed story, and then the kids took a word or phrase from the seed story and
that was the title of their story, with the chosen word/phrase becoming a link
(it was a user-friendly wiki in effect). This could be repeated to infinite
depth and words/phrases could link to more than one story (or partially
overlap etc).

I still have it in perpetual inactive development.

~~~
jeromec
I watched a Never Ending Story play out long ago (possibly it was on a
Lulu.com forum?). Absolutely horrible. You mix in bad writers with worse
writers, and just when you come across a half-decent page some other author
whisks the story off in a totally different direction.

~~~
haraball
What if people could continue the story tree horizontally, and continue on the
part they found most interesting? Then the parts with the most "continuations"
could get a higher ranking and therefore shape the best story at the
(never)end.

~~~
jeromec
That does sound like it could result in an improvement, but the tree would
grow quite large I imagine! :) Each writer would have to read each horizontal
version to decide where to continue, and I'm betting there would be multiple
continuation points, too, so it would start to look like the exponential
story, especially with a virtually endless supply of writers. Crowd-sourced
writing is a fun idea, but I think at best it might be an activity writers do
to stay creatively loose.

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user24
(64) ABtimise - see also genetify, snapads

Not saying that it's a problem that "the simpsons did it", just that it might
be interesting to see what their approach is and what can be learned from it.

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mashmac2
(66) Unbrainwash

Isn't this Fox News... Fair and Unbalanced :)

On a more serious note... I wonder if it is possible to measure bias of each
news source and use some sort of language processing to combine bias.

Google is certainly thinking about a similar topic... see yesterday's article
about sentiment analysis: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-
to-your-cus...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-
customers-is-bad-for.html) (it was on HN too somewhere...)

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hanibash
I have an idea: Take Facebook's approach to groups (the auto-add feature), and
apply it to a dating website.

It might turn out that this approach could replace siloed dating websites
(e.g. Christian, Jewish, BBW) into organically formed dating groups all on the
same website.

It's like taking the idea of <http://thread.com/> one step further.

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joebananas
Yeah, I don't see how 66 is ever gonna work as long as it's done by humans.

~~~
Semiapies
Sure, so long as you're willing to accept that "unbiased" will only mean
"pointing out when _everyone else's_ biases come into play*. :D

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gaustin
(67) ClickApp

I built something similar at a previous job. I never really thought that
anyone outside the domain it was built for would use it.

Now this has got me thinking about it again...

I wonder if it could be marketed to the same sorts of folks who use
SurveyMonkey and whatever that contact form builder company is called (it
pisses me off that I can't remember the name of it at the moment).

~~~
honopu
maybe wufoo?

~~~
gaustin
That's it.

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hanibash
I've always thought it would be interesting to take the genetic algorithm
approach on Facebook ads. But instead keep the ad display the same, and do an
A/B on customer demographics and interests.

The surprising and amusing patterns you find would alone make it worth it.

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jcfrei
(63) Chattical reminds me of my own project a while back: <http://askcue.com>
feel free to try it. As a sidenote: if I remember correctly I had the idea
around december in 2009.

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thedangler
Should just make an app for facebook for dating :) have all the people you
need.

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alnayyir
These ideas are intended to be fun little weekend hacks and not serious
businesses right?

Figured I'd ask because I clicked hoping for something else and wondered if I
was the only one that did so.

~~~
user24
I wrote up ten of my ideas with some more detail, if that's what you're
looking for: <http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/>

~~~
twymer
In response to your imCaptcha idea, have you ever seen
<http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/> ?

~~~
user24
yeah I played with that a while ago; a clever way to experiment with
crowdsourced image labelling. It would be interesting to see their results.

