Ideas, Rule

I remember in my school there was a painting which had two horses running through the woods and had a caption “Each must find it’s own way”. However, this blog post differs in someway and here’s how.

Last week I was in Venice and explored the city a lot by walking. Apart from hundreds of eager tourists, several museums/ churches I also found abundant businesses and as a tourist sometimes you have good experience dealing with them, while sometimes leaves a sour taste in your mouth (in my previous trip to Florence I ran into a horrible restaurant ripping off 48 euro for some for some trashy food). While spending good 3 days here, I thought a day would come when every tourist would do something mentioned below.

There would be “tracker” sitting on the phones of every tourist (yes and I am hoping that international data plan would be very very cheap or may be free ). Now this service would anonymously track the path of the traveler.  This application would do a lot of data mining on Best places to see in the given time constraint, restaurants to eat, mashup events, and not to mention hotels to stay and bars to hop into. The traveler can certainly attach experiences and put reviews for the activities/ businesses they dealt with. Services like Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr can be integrated.  It would also help the local authorities to plan and increase the infrastructure to serve the tourists in a better fashion. The possibilities are endless.

Social networking is not the main purpose of this application. What people “generally” do, is what it will tell.

However, the success of this depends on two important things (out of several other roadblocks)

- The willingness of the tourist to let the real time information published (even though it can be completely anonymous)

- Free international data roaming plan

May be someone is already working on making it work for making the life of tourists an easy experience.

You might have a long list, which you can add in the comments section. But this is what I have.

I feel what Twitter should do (and guess youtube did it very well) is opening up dedicated streams for current events. Youtube captured presidential elections, live symphonies and what not very well claiming it’s leadership in the video space.

I thought of starting a category which focuses on mashups of Web 2.0 applications. So instead of pulling social data from x number of places and arranging it on a new application, I think there is high time these entrepreneurs and VCs think of joining hands.

Now one can talk about several pros and cons of doing something like this. Without getting into it, all you have to understand is this:

- Users won’t have to remember URLs, login ids/ passwords and features

- They don’t have to worry about their distributed friend population across networks

- They won’t have to complain saying oh why is this feature not available in that application which is soooo much needed there also

I think the list is never ending. Now let me give you an example where I saw a partnership between two applications.

Tumblr has joined hands with Vimeo to host the videos of the users. Well, that makes sense to me.

So in this first post, I would like to suggest two applications which have some degree of overlap in their offering, should think about either sharing data/ UI/ features/ user base.

It will certainly be a win win situation for everyone.

Ning and Meetup

About Ning:

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours.Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members. Explore some of the features you’ll get:

http://about.ning.com/product.php

About Meetup:

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.

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Well, while writing this blog and reading more about Ning and Meetup, I came across profile of Brad Burnham who happens to be on the board of both Meetup and Ning