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.

One thing which is truely part of every Infosys employee is the INFOSYS BULLETIN BOARD (or BB as it is called). During my stay with Infosys, Bangalore, I did not visit the Bulletin Board often, but heard quite many things and discussions on the same.

Be it technology, social talks, queries, buy/ sell — it had it all and straight from the heart (well brains too)

I had an idea then, and created a presentation below. I had sent it to Nandan Nilekani, and he was kind enough to reply back and asked to me to talk to a senior project manager and see where it goes. Meanwhile I moved out of the company. 

However I still feel that this idea has some potential. And why only Infosys? I am sure most of the companies have a forum where employees express their opinions. If possible, why don’t use that collective intelligence to contribute towards a social cause.

An Idea for Infosys Bulletin Board

Came across this site at Salesforce – http://mystarbucksidea.force.com

I guess the ailing coffee giant is trying to use some collective intelligence. Not a bad idea. I also added one of mine. Check it out!

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideaView?id=087500000005HzzAAE

Feel free to comment too.

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.

—————-

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

Okay, 2008-09 is Twitter year. It’s a whole new world out there with its own language containing words like tweets, @, RT etc. However my guess is Twitter started to capture and share “What are you doing?”, and is thus is becoming a complete Internet Drain. I was following a friend and he is talking about coffee, snow, oatmeal. I mean it might be “cute”, “informative” to some, but definitely not me. Yeah, reminds you of Facebook or other social networks. In the beginning it looks great .. but eventually turns out a chaos.

Here is my wishlist of new applications which can be built on the Micro-blogging framework. Frankly it will be great if these features are available in Twitter itself so that I don’t have to keep track of other apps built on Twitter APIs.

1. Filter Tweets (Fileets)

Well, I want to know what my friend A is doing in the evenings, and should be able to subscribe to only those tweets which are posted in the evening. Don’t want to know what he is having for breakfast, or that he had a heated argument with his boss (who doesn’t!!)

Yeah, alright I am following Obama, but then I am only interested to listen on the TARP or Economic Rescue Plan.

The point is if I am following 100 people and they all post 10 tweets, either I will miss some tweets out of these 1000 or I will go crazy. Well I might even get fired from my work place to be so loyal to Twitter.

2. Pattern Twitter (Pwitter)

Advertisers want to see pattern. Scientist as well. Nature herself has a pattern. Why don’t these social networks see that? If I am following people who talk mostly on Innovation, Ideas, Venture Capital — it should pattern it out and get me useful suggestions to follow other users who contribute on such topics.

3. Answer Twitter (Anster)

Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Questions, Answerbag.com — so many places to ask questions. Why? Can’t we use a Twitter model instead? It would be more productive.

4. Group Twitter (Gwitter)

10 years back Yahoo Groups were so popular. We all use to have groups for close college friends, another group for entire class etc etc. Several of them. It was fun people posting their updates, attachments. This trend got replaced by Facebook, Orkut and likewise networks.

These days I feel even usage of Facebook is an overkill to keep in touch. Isn’t Twitter sufficient enough? But then I want different groups in Twitter.

Well lets say I will create one group as NY Friends, another one as College Friends. Start adding people in these groups so that they can read and write on these groups.

5. News Twitter (Nwitter)

I am thinking of working on this idea, and is in it’s very early stage. So instead of writing what it is about I might be able to show it to you. Till then please keep thinking and tweeting

In my last post I wrote about how there should be some kind of monitoring service. One of my friends critiqued me that this is against the whole concept of freedom of expression blah blah blah.

I disagreed. The service is meant only for Enterprises and companies susceptible to get pulled into court because either employee has said something inappropriate. Now the next question is does this “check” apply for every social network? NO. Minitoring applies to those sites where employees put their company names (examples: LinkedIn, Facebook) because now the world sees their talks and associates them with the company.

Think about anti sexual harrassment policy we all sign when we take up a job. Infosys did not have any such policy and when Phaneesh Murthy’s scandal came up in 2003, it was company who had to pay 3 million USD.  Why? The simple reason is Infosys did not a policy which employees had signed. 

I am referring to similar issues which companies will face. So if we have such service they will serve two purpose.

A. Corporations will get a disclaimer from the employees that whatever activities an employee does, enterprise doesn’t have any role in it.

B. Monitor and report back any illegal/ inappropriate talk on the web, so that before it reaches every mailbox it can be pulled down.

Yeah, I think it will be needed soon.

Sometime back I came across this article in Economist. Here is a paragraph from it.

“On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.”

While talking to a friend, I was telling him a possibility of Social Policing. With several hundred online social networks around, with several million working professionals, there is a high chance of one “uttering” something not meant to be. The concept goes like this.