I have a Sony DSC-W1 and have really enjoyed it: it’s incredibly easy-to-use. So now that I’m thinking about expanding, I’m wondering if I’d like to leave the Sony world.
I’d hate to have to know 2 or 3 camera operating systems and modes of operation – which I’d have to do if I bought from a different company.
I’ve got my eye on the DSC-T30 for myself: ultra-portable, but still fairly good quality. I’ve had my eye on the T series for a long time, and would love this camera for an everyday, always on me camera.
And I’m wondering about the DSC-H5 for Teresa, my wife, and our home and family shots. It’s going to be better indoors with less red eye because of the larger flash that’s more separate from the lense, and the 12X optical zoom is very enticing.
You want to be cool. You want to be an entrepreneur. And you want to start a shiny new web 2.0 company. Here’s an idea for you:
You 2.0. Or myspy.
I can’t decide which name I like better. But here’s the idea in four words: persistent painless personal history.
Got that?
The idea’s free. If you do it, let me know. I’d love to help in any way I can. But I’m not doing it myself, for a perfectly valid reason that might stop you too.
Here’s the idea
The business is simple: build a Firefox plugin and an Internet Explorer toolbar that do nothing but report what websites you’re visiting to a server. That builds a list of sites that you’ve visited.
That’s basically it. A few details:
You can go back to see the sites you’ve visited in the past
Others can see what sites you’ve been to
You can display the sites you’ve visited as a feed to your blog
You can search your visited sites
You can search all the sites that people have visited
You can see popular sites displayed on the home page
Over time, you build in more cool features by spidering and auto-tagging pages that people are visiting, and building pretty (but oh-so-useful) tag clouds on users’ home pages.
Pretty cool, huh? Neat for an individual, and cool because a community could develop around it. As digital becomes a huge part of our identities (Flickr, blogs, MySpace, etc.), wouldn’t you want painless personal history?
There’s only that one problem I mentioned earlier. Actually, there’s two:
1: Filthy lucre, or lack thereof
I can’t figure out how to monetize it. And without monetizing it, it would just be a cool project that, if it got popular, would bog down under its own weight of server and bandwidth costs.
In other words, I’m not convinced AdSense would cover the bills.
2: Competitors
There are three or four potential competitors that could totally and completely kill it:
Alexa
Mozilla
Google
Microsoft
All four of these already have or very easily could have toolbars that install and essentially phone home on every click. That done, the rest is easy. And for Alexa and/or Google, it would be right up their alley.
Tempting
Still, it’s tempting. You 2.0. Myspy. Persistent painless personal history. Inherently social.
Spyware where the spy-er and the spy-ee are the same person.
I like it!
Full disclosure: I ran this idea past Guy Kawasaki, and while he thought it was cool too … also did not see a viable business model. He’s a pretty clueful guy. But if you decide to prove us wrong and try to make it work: go for it!
9 major sections, 5-6 subsections, and a whole page of “things you need to know before starting.”
I find it incredibly how educators can be so incredibly … ummm … how can I say “stupid” nicely? They seem to think that learning something requires exhaustive dissection of the thing to be learned, categorization, and step-by-careful-linear-step progression through a series of stages.
If Daring Fireball looks like shit in your browser, you’re using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 5, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the point is that they’re real.
Most businesses and marketers could learn a lot from this type of plainspoken openness. Yes, you’ll lose customers. But you’ll also gain some.
And how is being vanilla working for you right now?
Since both Aidan and Ethan were doing podcasts tonight (Aidan on his third birthday, and Ethan on his favorite games, Gabrielle could not possibly survive the night without doing her own.
This is a test of Sidewalk. Sidewalk lets you create web forms very, very simply, and stick them on your website without any application development whatsoever – and very little technical ability or knowledge at all.
Here’s my first test … tell me something that’s cool:
The best thing about this is not that anyone can do it. (OK, maybe it is.)
But the second best thing is that I don’t have to get a developer to build something. Two minutes with this tool saves me getting a developer to build something … and saves that developer an hour of his time.
The other reason that this kind of service is really, really important, is that every company or group that has a website occasionally has the need for some totally out-of-the-box wild blue-sky widget on their site. The CEO wants to check if people who buy green widgets like salted herring, or something like that.
Well, in a traditional development world, that’s somehow got to be fit into a site or application data model. It never will. And it never should.
I ran over to Plaxo, a company that synchronizes contact data between you, your various devices, your friends, and anyone you want. Mostly because I saw this post which says, basically, that they suck.
Checking out their products, they offer a free service, but if you upgrade you get space for more contacts, and, drum roll please, access to their e-cards.
Oh, sorry, that’s premium e-cards.
E-cards are so done, so over, so 1997-cheesy-flash-irritating-music-childish-animation that I’m at a loss for words, really, to describe how stunning it is that any company thinks there’s competive advantage in them anymore. Even ‘premium’ ones.
Today, Microsoft basically purchased the privilege that it received a week or so ago: getting pre-installed on all of Lenovo computers made and sold in China. It’s a realpolitik manoevre that Microsoft basically had to make: buying $700 million of hardware in order to sell $1.2 billion of software.
Since software has few incremental costs to Microsoft, it’s a good deal as far as it goes. I’m sure that Microsoft views this as an investment in an ongoing campaign to fight piracy in China. At least it’s better than the alternative: continuing rampant piracy, and no revenue at all.
Of course, one wonders how an Apple or a Sun or a RedHat could compete against this. You need deep pockets to place these kinds of bribes.
I’m doing some education research lately and happened to come across this article which refers to the “Canada effect.”
Some have quipped that state-level student achievement in the U.S. can be best predicted by proximity to Canada …
In other words, the most northern states typically have the best results.
However, lest we Canadians get too cockey, we need to remember that correlation is not equivalent to causation, since the article continues ….
–which in turn may be a proxy for variations among states in factors ranging from demographics (e.g., student poverty, parent education, and race) to political culture and spending on education.
Too bad there isn’t something in the air which we can bottle and sell, and trim off the national debt or something.
I received an invite to a marketing webcast from the American Marketing Association today.
Halfway through the first paragraph:
Traditional communication methods such as mail, email and a generic “dot com” website experience are simply not working.
Wow. Innovative to traditional in less than a decade.
I think a lot of small, innovative web companies knew this, and have known it for at least a few years, but I didn’t know that the American Marketing Association knows it.
(Of course, they are pushing customer portals as the cutting-edge replacement solution, so maybe they still don’t know it.)
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
I’ve got my eye on the DSC-T30 for myself: ultra-portable, but still fairly good quality. I’ve had my eye on the T series for a long time, and would love this camera for an everyday, always on me camera.
It’s going to be better indoors with less red eye because of the larger flash that’s more separate from the lense, and the 12X optical zoom is very enticing.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
