IDEA #73 - Friends Categorized as API to other Facebook Apps
September 9, 2007 | 4 Comments
Another Facebook application idea comin’ at ya!…
Robert Scoble has vocalized how he doesn’t like the restriction Facebook puts on your number of friends (5,000) and that he wants as many people to be his friend as they want.
But the problem Robert (and others with tons of friends — even if it’s 100) is that you don’t really care about the actions of all those people — and in FB apps, you really want to see the actions of certain top friends of yours. For example, take the photos app — I have “friends” in FB that are really business colleagues — I don’t care about the latest photo albums they posted; I care about my close friends and family. But I see all my FB friends instead.
We really all have various classifications of “friends” — professional colleagues, best friends, family members, etc.
I think there’s a need to classify these friends into groups — likely invisible to all your “friends” — but so that you can get the updates in FB applications that you really care about.
I’m proposing that someone develops a Facebook Application that other Facebook Applications can leverage. It’ll allow a user to group their friends — and then other Facebook Applications can leverage how your preferences on your friends, and display the most relevant info to you first (such as in photos, it’ll just display your best friends and family photo album additions/changes — rather than mixing all of your friends/family/colleagues together).
Facebook’s Terms of Service don’t want you to rebuild/save the way friendships are — because their biggest value is their social network, so you’d have to put some thought into whether this violates that. I don’t believe it does, because you don’t care about names, email addresses, etc — just a UID and their friends’ UIDs categorized. Then another Facebook App could ask the user what updates/notifications they’d like to see — or who the main page of that Facebook App should display (all your friends? just ‘family’? just ‘best friends’? just ‘Purdue buds’? …any groups the user wants to create).
In fact, this app could allow you to add more than 5,000 friends — users could click a profile action link under the user’s profile to ‘add Steve Poland’ as a friend. The user would have this API app installed — could be called their “Friend Manager” or something. And on the user’s profile page could be a profile box that displays all their friends — could also allow you to display your top friends (”top 8″, or “top 16″ or whatever) and could even allow the user to show how they’ve categorized their friends (if they wanted to do so).
IDEA #72 - Digg for Facebook Photos
September 6, 2007 | 2 Comments
Not actually Digg, but a Facebook application like Digg, but for photos on Facebook. Facebook apparently has the most photos anywhere on the web — there should be a button under each allowing users viewing them to rate them (thumbs up/down; or rate 1-10; or click a ‘LOL’ vote to vote up the funniest pictures). Then the main page of the Facebook app would show the top rated (and funniest) photos of your friends; as well as the ones your friends voted top (which could be photos that don’t have your friends in them); as well as the top photos (funny and top rated) by the entire Facebook network.
Update: The widget on the user’s Profile page could show a random photo from their collection; or it could show thumbnails of the ones people have rated funniest, or top rated. Or it could show photos across Facebook that the user’s profile you’re viewing, has rated funniest or top rated.
Question: I know you can get access to photos via FB dev platform, but I’m not sure what restrictions/privacy there is — if any. I would think you could only view photos shared by your friends???
IDEA #71 - User-Gen Opinionated Videos, Photos, or Text (Facebook App)
September 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Alright, kinda of similar to this previous idea, but not completely.
QUESTIONS TO USERS - we want to extract original video (photo/text) content from our users, thus we want to give them “tasks” in a sense. Based on what we know about them, ask them related questions — such as “What is your favorite pizza joint in Buffalo?” or “Did you see Brokeback Mountain; if so, what did you think?” or “Will you go see Jurassic Park IV when it comes out? Why or why not?”.
For the newsfeed, we will also show recent video (photo/text) posts by friends, such as “Jennifer just posted a video for her favorite chinese food in Austin” or “Rick just posted a video about the movie ‘Swingers’” or “Julie just posted a video about the law firm - Crane, Poole, & Schmitt”.
Users can submit their own questions that they can send to their Facebook friends [viral].
IDEA #70 - Voting for Video Stars (Facebook App)
September 6, 2007 | Leave a Comment
From this previous idea post.
DAILY VIDEO CREATION CONTEST
Each day, a topic is chosen that users have 24-hours to create a video that incorporates the topic. For example, the topic might be “Altoids” – one user might create a 15-second video clip of Altoids dropping out of the tin canister and bouncing off a wooden floor; Or a female user might create a video that has Altoids lined-up on her body leading you on a trail to something provocative only to stop the video at that point.
Everyone submits their unique video during that 24-hour period. The following day (“Day 2”), there will be a new topic that people can create videos for (such as “Belly Button”), but also they can view all of the prior day’s video entries (in this example, the “Altoids” videos) and rate them. On Day 3, the winners are announced for the “Altoids” videos, as well as people can view/rate the video entries for the “Belly Button” topic, and a new topic is announced (such as “Basketball”).
1. Why this will work: People will be competing with each other to come up with the most original video based on the same topic that everyone else is using and for which everyone had the same amount of time to create a video (“level playing field”).
2. Why this will be so valuable: Imagine receiving 15,000 unique videos incorporating one of these topics such as Altoids. Imagine the power of walking into Coca-Cola and saying, “I can have 15,000 unique videos created within 24 hours that incorporates your brand and that will be viewed by 1 million users. In a total of 48 hours, I would have those same videos all rated/ranked by peers, so that you know which ones were rated/ranked the best by their peers.”
HOW IT WORKS
The daily theme works like this: On day A, they know the theme to create videos for that will appear on Day B. On Day B, they will be able to see everyone’s videos for that theme and then go through a “TV” type functionality where they don’t see the rating of the videos at all – not even on the following screen. They also don’t see who created the video. All they see is the video, a rating box, and a comment box. On Day C, all of the ratings for the videos are revealed.
1. On Day C, the top 10 theme videos for that contest appear on a page where you can view all the videos for that theme. (This section might be called “Daily Themes” or “Missions” or “Tasks” or “Daily Contest”).
2. Must be balanced and allow all videos to get votes, but as day progresses, start dwindling it down to videos that are getting the highest scores.
3. On Day C, allow users to see the videos they personally watched and voted on as little thumbnails on a page with the username, rating, and their rating of it. (For curiosity sake).
IDEA #69 - Get Users Pulling Info From Others (Facebook App)
September 6, 2007 | 1 Comment
Allow someone to be viewing the profile of someone’s page, and let them select a predefined question … such as “What are you wearing?”, “What are you doing?”, or “Show me something blue.”
Then a photo text message is sent to that user’s cell phone (by email) with the photo of the member and the question. [Or it’s sent via newsfeed or an invite]. The user can then reply to that email/txt (with video and/or photo and/or text) and the response is auto-posted to their profile page and privately messaged to the interacting user.
This starts to get people to pull information from others — and create tons of more content on the site, and more interactions among members.
There must be other ideas as to how you can get users to “pull” info from others — by asking questions, or suggesting things, etc. What ideas do you have?
IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook)
September 6, 2007 | 3 Comments
An app where we give people instructions to do things; we give them purpose to live each day. Maybe we change this “task” every 6 hours or something; or maybe it’s more frequently (or maybe there’s just always a big list of things we can task users to do). Some quick ideas of what we may tell a user to do:
What is the greatest thing in your city?
Photograph the 3 meals you eat today.
Take a photo in the tanning booth.
Who/where is your hair dresser?
Basically we create the largest community of new content and photos from people in all sorts of cities. Then we get others to comment on these photos, videos, or text write-ups.
We get to a point where we are instructing people and giving them purpose each day. “Everyone go on the subway or bus today, and photograph it. Submit here.”
We could do good things in the world as well — “Go out on your street and pickup 10 cigarette butts”.
Or we could do funny things, “Go out today in all black, to your local Starbucks, and at 1pm EST, starting singing ‘happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me’” or something like that. Those kind of funny things would eventually get press, and kids in Facebook would love participating.
IDEA #67 - Desktop/Mobile IM Client for Facebook
September 5, 2007 | 6 Comments
Facebook Development API allows desktop apps to be created and has a code library for them. I’m surprised no one has created an Instant Messenging application (like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc) that uses Facebook users — obviously your friends list, but also live chat rooms too.
There is supposedly a Facebook web app for IM, but all the user comments on it make it sound as though it doesn’t work.
You could also likely write a mobile app (iPhone, new wifi iPod, etc) that is a Facebook IM client.
IDEA #66 - Polls on Current News (Facebook App)
September 4, 2007 | 5 Comments
I imagine this Facebook app that is simply polls of real current news, associated with links to the news. Likely heavily focused on celebs, but could be categorized into sports, business/stocks, celebs, entertainment/tv/movies, music, etc. You could submit your own questions, which would then be scrutinized by a digg-like “duplicate poll question” filter, then would be added. Users in the network could flag the question as a dupe, or the question just happens — every question exists, but only certain ones become “hot”, or are basically asked of most people in the network — whereas other questions start circulating via people’s newsfeeds in Facebook.
This also gets people in tune with current news/events.
Examples:
“Do you think R. Kelly will ever go to jail?” yes, no — or the submitter makes up his own answers. Users can also post their own comment (discussion!) on the news. Also a link to the news piece: ... .
Maybe this is too much like digg?
IDEA #65 - Universal Login that verifies/ties your Digg, MySpace, FB, etc Accounts together
September 4, 2007 | 5 Comments
Another submission to Startup Weekend in Toronto…
Universal Login that verifies/ties your Digg, MySpace, Facebook, etc Accounts together
Contributor: Steve Poland
I know there’s OpenID, and quite frankly I don’t know enough about it. And not all websites are embracing it anyhow, so it’s not the solution at the moment. I think there should be a company that will tie all your various accounts together and just verify that for other websites (Rapleaf attempted this with eBay users, but eBay retaliated, considering eBay’s most important data is their community, users, and the ratings those users have built up) — so that all the websites can share data on a user, if the user allows them to. So I’m not talking about some website where “you’re going to see all your latest myspace/facebook/digg messages or blah blah blah”, but I’m simply talking about a website where you setup an account, then we’ll verify that your username on digg is spirkster, and your MySpace URL is ..., and your Facebook profile is ..., and your Last.fm profile is ..., etc etc etc. We’d have an API, so that apps could tap into this and verify a user easily — and then apps could even open up various data of their own to other applications to incorporate on a user that the other app already verified.
Revenue: unsure; maybe our website has a webpage for each of our users and has some advertising on it? Maybe we try to become a MyBlogLog, but each site embeds a widget and it’ll display that user’s profile info for that specific app that they are on?
Any value in this idea?
Update: Is this what I’m talking about — ...
IDEA #64 - AuctionAds copycat using Affiliate Product DB or just Amazon.com’s Product DB
September 4, 2007 | 3 Comments
I’m submitting ideas to the Toronto Startup Weekend that I’ll be attending in 10 days and will post them here as well. I apologize for the post not looking that great, but I still have a lot more I want to post tonight.
AuctionAds dupe using Amazon.com products or all etailers products from LinkShare/Shareasale/CJ Product Data Feeds
Contributor: Steve Poland
Revenues come from affiliate commissions once higher levels are reached. AuctionAds provided a slick tool for displaying eBay auctions on user’s sites (not contextual, thus not conflicting with the TOS for Google AdSense). Users get paid the same as if they were an eBay affiliate direct, but AuctionAds is able to combine all earnings from everyone and collect higher percentages — thus they make like 2% on top of everyone’s sales in the network.
I’m proposing a dupe of AuctionAds, but based on the products of Amazon.com — and/or the products from all clients from affiliate networks LinkShare, Shareasale, and Commission Junction.
Another competitor doing something similar that hasn’t taken off (unsure why; need to research) - Primofeed.
Note: Linkshare product data feeds aren’t advertised on their website and costs $250. I have access to them, so I can provide the huge data files that list all the products from their clients. Linkshare has 300k products in their data feeds, Shareasale has about 1.8mm, and combined the products come from about 400 retailers. The data feeds combined are about 50 MB and include product title, description, URL to product images, category/subcategories that differ for every store, etc. Commission Junction also has data feeds that I have access to — and they definitely allow sub-affiliate IDs, which is necessary for this (I still have to verify that Linkshare and Shareasale allow sub-affil accounts) — as each user that signs up will be assigned a sub-affiliate ID. We’d pay monthly via PayPal and every user’s embed widget of products [from us] includes an affiliate link for themselves, which we’d then pay them like 2% of commissions that any new affiliates they bring into our network generate.
Note: This would have massive database requirements — so that we can quickly serve up widgets with advertised products from our database, to users of any website for associated keywords that the blog/site owner specifies. And we’d want to randomize the products we display to users, but also keep track of the products that are “hot” (high CTR). We may want/need to resize the product images and store them somewhere, but I don’t think we need to do that now — I don’t think AuctionAds does that. Eventually, we’ll build this, get Shoemoney involved, and sell to MediaWhiz. 
