

Ask HN: Here is my current batch of ideas. In exchange, I ask for your feedback. - famfam

I have a pool of unimplemented (or partially implemented) ideas laying around right now. I've decided to let them go into the wild in order to light a fire under myself to chase after which ever ones (if any) that I "miss" after I let go. Not claiming any of these are original, but I though there may be unique  opportunities in some of them.<p>In sharing these, all I ask is that you provide feedback on them, even in the form of "I hate 1,2, don't care about 3, 5, 6, and I may be interested in 4."<p>1. An alternate twitter landing page (e.g. username.twitteridea.com) that each user can heavily style and customize. I'm shocked that Twitter customization is relegated to simple background images and color. Tweets are pulled via client-side javascript, so themes are simple html/css/js. As awful as MySpace skinning was, people clearly wanted it. Viral potential is large here. Main problem, people don't read a lot of tweets by visiting a user's profile. Revenue model a bit iffy.<p>2. A simplified system for conducting beta tests. Match up companies (thinking micro ISVs or small webapps here -- this is not an enterprise play) that need exposure + a diverse tester pool with people who like being early adopters. Allow testers to earn reputations and allow companies to filter candidates through quality thresholds. Now testers are incentivized to do a better job, so they can get into more "exclusive" betas. Plenty of room to add in social elements here too. I think someone must be doing this but I've yet to Google the right set of keywords to find them. The differentiator here is that it's an offering for <i>testers</i> too, not just companies. Almost creating a marketplace where the currency is reputation.<p>3. A hosted solution for referrals (non e-commerce - this is not an affiliate system). I posted about this here once at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280478. Basic idea is to host a system/api that lets you build per-user referral codes, track those referrals, and then provide widgets to let you give users badges, show top referrers, things like that.<p>4. A guided daily diary. Inspired by Keen's Simple Diary. http://www.simplediary.com  Pose simple questions to allow people to reflect on each day. Short and sweet, no feeling of obligation. Okay, that's just a rehash of the book itself. Now make it interesting by crowd-sourcing the guided questions or making them social (amongst your friends). Share entries etc. Favoriting answers. This needs more fleshing out. Big problems are: content until you solve crowd-sourcing, and how to monetize.<p>5. Private blogs/microsocial sites for families. Keep it fun and easy - think Tumblr. #1 use case is just sharing photos - email sucks for this, nor am I friending grandma on Facebook to share photos, and almost all blogging platforms I've seen besides Posterous do not offer a reasonable password protection system. But after photo sharing, I think family member activity streams could be fun, and you could integrate some location functionality so kids could "check in" easily without having to call/txt etc. There are a lot of ways it could go. I posted about this at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385447. The offerings I can find - myfamily.com, familysays.com, and famiva.com are truly wretched. Seems like a huge opportunity here.<p>6. Site monitoring that goes beyond the simple "is it up"/ping/L7 health check junk. Gomez and Alertsite et al. are fine solutions but stupidly expensive. Just stupidly expensive. Seems like there is a gap you can slide into here between those two ends of the spectrum. Real admins measure their page latencies not just uptime. (Note: just found out about http://www.watchmouse.com today, which sort of moots this... seems to be just what I envisioned at the price point that I imagined could succeed.)
======
petervandijck
#2 Like it, but it feels somehow like it'd be a though one.

#4 I think vox.com does that. Whatever happened to vox btw? Is it just hanging
in there, bringing in some ad revenue?

#5 I was thinking about this yesterday. Definitely a need. Photos + stories
are huge, think family sitting around picture albums.

#6: yea, totally. I always thought site monitoring where you can send it
events from your backend or js. Google analytics has events, but can't send it
from backend (ie. signups, ...)

~~~
famfam
2 - yeah, I think there are multiple challenges - #1 sales cycles and custom
requirements #2 how to bootstrap testers #3 the infamous problem of "no one
googles your solution when they don't know the concept exists" -- do companies
think "oh i should go look for a company that provides beta testers?" don't
think so. maybe it just means that paid search won't work. maybe it just needs
a lot of CPM marketing on sites for developers and good old word of mouth.

4 - not sure, never tried vox.

5 - no one seems to be directly attacking the vertical very well. i think
"families" is a vertical, right? :) some things you can repurpose to get what
you want, but the average person would never think to use it that way. the
ones that are specifically built for families -- well they're either just
awful, or seem like some kind of re-skinned groupware.

6 - you can do that in google analytics. it's a hack, but you can definitely
post up metrics from the server side, if you just build up the urls that it
needs. but anyway, this is definitely something where i was just thinking more
about availability and performance monitoring.

------
petervandijck
#5: the demand seems to be there. Assuming this is a freemium, then the
challenge will be to acquire enough customers. You would assume that after the
initial drop-off, the data gathered would be very valuable and people would
want to keep paying... So after building the basic tech, it becomes a
marketing play? I'd love to hear more thoughts on this, or perhaps good sites,
because if I found a good one I'd use it. (Not sure what defines good here
though.)

------
jasonlbaptiste
Ironically I'm tackling 3(<http://flow.cloudomatic.com>) and
5(<http://www.genevine.com>) right now.

I like 2 a lot as well.

~~~
famfam
These sites look great. I love that you can get started at Genevine without
signing up, I tried to do that at <http://todoneapp.com> too. The price point
seems a bit high (consider that Flickr is what, $25 a year or so?) - but the
functionality looks spot on and the website is really elegant. Same thing with
Flow.. seriously, who does the design? I love it. It seems more focused on
e-commerce/affiliate than I intended for my own idea; I think I was
specifically trying to avoid that angle because there are SOOOO many solutions
out there. But yours looks like it could stand out :)

Thanks for the feedback on #2. I'm starting to think I should make a go at it.

------
lazyant
Humble opinions:

1\. Easy to implement, but I don't know if people would be interested in it.
Another downside is that twitter can pull the rug under your feet at any time.

2\. Interesting. I'm not sure if the benefits for testers are big enough.

3\. I have no opinion on this; I don't like the referrals in general (except
free "word of mouth") anyways.

4\. nice but as with any social site it's hard to get the initial people and
critical mass.

5\. Hard to differentiate enough or see the real benefit when there are so
many blogs/facebook/etc applications out there.

6\. There are definitively lots of monitoring services of all kinds, prices
(from zero) and features. It would be interesting to have one addressing a
very particular niche one or at a particular feature set / price point as you
said.

~~~
famfam
I like your feedback, since I am a pessimist and can see the truth in all your
criticism :)

1 - totally agreed it's a Twitter feature waiting to be vacuumed up. but it's
SO easy to implement. and I know how to make it go way viral. i think? :)

2 - why does anyone beta test anything? i think people just like feeling
special, having special access, being early adopters, being influencers, etc.
plus, i imagine the site as totally having badges/rewards built into it by
design. and version.future - framework to allow companies to reward their
testers (name in credits, direct payments, tip jar, whatever)

4 - agreed. maybe i could use #3 to solve this problem :)

5 - i know there's a market for this one, just from being a parent and knowing
lots of parents. i don't think facebook is acceptable since there are weird
issues with friending your parents etc, and grandmom is probably not even on
the site. blog-wise, there are verrry few blogging platforms that have the
right security controls.

6 - agreed. it would be easy enough to try something simple: 10 urls, 10
sampling nodes, 10 tests an hour, $10 a month - and just see what kind of
interest is out there.

------
megamark16
With regards to #6: The bank I used to work at used Gomez and we were (well
they probably still are) paying out the ying yang for a handful of tests each
hour against a few core webapps.

So I had this idea to create a distributed monitoring service that would use
nodes (similar to the genome@home project) with actual residential internet
connections to give websites a true idea of how fast their site was from
different locations around the world. Node owners would just be regular
people, and they would get a small percentage of the revenue from each test
they ran, and the infrastructure would be designed such that a failing or slow
test result would initiate verification tests from other nodes to insure that
it wasn't just an issue due to the node's internet connection slowing down or
failing. Gomez runs different test from their own servers around the country
and sometimes we could tell what the issue was based on which nodes were down
(i.e. the west coast server is the only one that's failing). So we'd have all
these nodes running all over the world and we could tell people "well here's
how quickly this page and all it's resources load from New York City, LA, and
Russia..." and give them historical and real time metrics and notifications
based on those response times.

I got as far as creating a client that worked relatively well and was ready to
upload results for each test ran to a master server, plus it made requests to
the master server to see what the next test it needed to run was. With all the
other availability testing services out there I kind of moved on, but I've
still got the source if someone is interested.

~~~
famfam
Yeah, I've been a Gomez user before and the pricing was utterly shocking, to
say the least. Additionally, I think our pricing plan only even allowed tests
from 10 nodes or so. I was wondering if I could write a php endpoint that acts
as a testing node and just buy cheap hosted php boxes all over the world on as
many backbones as I'd need to cover. Obviously testing through real users is
better, but 9 times out of 10 the interesting stuff in Gomez is a function of
problems in your backend, not ISP problems... and anyway, what are you going
to do about those? We got all kinds of false positives when the Gomez nodes
would glitch out. Almost no signal and all noise.

------
Rust
#5 - I actually started developing this one, called KinCMS (stupid, but
descriptive), but got a job before finishing it - and thus, never got back to
it. I never let it go, either, and some of it's code formed the basis of
Noostr recently. I guess I should get it working and launched, eh?

#6 - Again, something I had started and had working for my own servers a few
years ago, but never expanded or monetized. I don't think I have my old source
code anymore though...

------
WestCoastJustin
#6 -- you should check out nagios. We have many thousands of checks running on
all aspects of our infrastructure. Allows for email, text messages, etc
notifications on OK, WARN, and CRITICAL events. There are plenty of plugins
already available but if you want something custom create it... it's free and
open-source.

For example, we have checks to see if there are fan, drive, power supply, etc,
failures within systems. We also monitor main power feeds, UPS, ventilation,
etc on site infrastructure. You can also monitor/graph/check history of
websites and their load times.

EDIT: you might also want to check out ganglia from the OS side. This doesn't
allow notifications (as far as I know) like nagios but you can instantly see
what your resources are being used on in larger machine clusters.

~~~
famfam
Sure, Nagios, Collectd, Ganglia etc etc etc are all options. But I'm talking
about something hosted, external, URL-based (so we can find user-facing
problems), and most importantly simple and affordable. Something where you
might be okay spending $10-$100 month rather than having to have someone
manage a fine-grained internal monitoring system.

------
coverband
#2 has a lot of promise, based on the gap I experienced first hand working for
a very large software company. They have supposedly a complex infrastructure
to get beta users but had extreme difficulty in extending it to thousands of
users and consolidating their input.

I would consider #5 as the weakest idea in the bunch. There are an enormous
number of existing sites that offer the same premise. In fact, one could even
use Facebook in the same way when the family restricts the friends to other
family members.

------
djb_hackernews
I like pretty much all of them, though have no use for any of them.

#1 would be super simple and I predict very popular. Could build an ecosystem
of template designers ala wordpress themes.

#2 All I can think of is mechanical turk.

#3 takes the work out of having to build all that yourself.

#4 I imagined this like a daily email service a la Groupon instead of a
webapp.

#5 How does this not already exist?

#6 I'd like to steal this one but don't have the time

------
nreece
#1 doesn't really solve a major problem for a lot of people.

I like #2. I've been thinking about something similar (Feedback for Startups -
<http://www.nilkanth.com/2010/05/21/6-ideas-off-my-chest/>)

Simple Diary (#4) looks cool, but I'm not sure if it can do more than a hobby.

Family network (#5) sounds interesting. Facebook, and other family networks,
are just bloated.

~~~
famfam
1 - not sure about that. i know it's not a problem, but there may be a need.
it might only target the younger end of the twitter demographic. i think the
proof is in how feverishly people customized myspace, and added widgets to
their FB back in its earlier incarnations. even LJ - you mostly read it
through your friends page (e.g. your own theme), yet you still themed it to
show off to whoever visited your profile.

2 - interesting. did anything come of you getting your ideas off your chest?
:)

4 - agreed. it's probably a hobby or in the best case a one hit wonder.

5 - i think something really customized to the problem could be successful.
everyone is forced to shoehorn social networks or blogs (e.g. CMSs) into the
solution. i really picture something that's fundamentally different, while
incorporating elements of each.

------
jeffepp
1\. Great idea, agree on limitations but I would def use it. 2\. Love it -
would use 100% 3\. Building sth like this currently (+ affiliate) 4\. not for
me 5\. this is a great idea. If you are serious about this, email me I know
someone in this space looking for help 6\. Not techie enough to understand the
value of this.

------
orlick
There is something I really like about #4 the guided daily diary. I wonder if
you could turn this idea into a dating site -- users can submit a guide and
the top ranked ones get answered the next day. Users of the site can browse
everyone's answers for that day.

------
Rickasaurus
I like #5 quite a lot. You could probably monetize quite well by selling print
versions of the online content they generate. The one caveat though: it's got
to be simple enough for grandma/grandpa.

------
robgough
I've not seen this mentioned yet, but there is a mac only version of 2)
already <http://macdeveloper.net>

------
petervandijck
ps #6: is there a reliable solution to track respone times (latency) over
time? I want to enter, say, 10 urls, preferably some with a cookie (loggedin),
and see from various locations how fast they are (including js, images, ...).
I'd pay 10$/month for this. I don't need any other features, just good, easy
and reliable latency/speed measuring, so that I can work on improving it and
actually see results (or not).

------
shanked
#2 I've been working on for 2 months and will be releasing in a week or two...
I'm still debating what the name should be, any ideas?

~~~
famfam
Are you using your product to test your product? :)

~~~
shanked
Yes, my App will be on the list of Apps accepting testers! :)

------
marilyn
<http://www.launchly.com/> is doing #2 I believe

~~~
famfam
looks deadish?

------
smwhreyebelong
I had thought about a variation of #2 at some point but I've been too busy to
implement anything.

~~~
famfam
It's beginning to stick out to me as the one thing from this list that I
should make a go at.

------
Concours
I hate 1. , I like 6. and I'm not interest in the rest.

