50 Days to New Years Eve - Buffalo’s Party: The Ice Ball
November 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
If you’re from Buffalo and looking for plans for New Year’s Eve — I’d like to recommend to you the party of the year, with expectations of 500 in attendance… The Ice Ball.
Visit the website to purchase tickets, to view the Facebook and MySpace event pages (so you can invite all your friends), and learn more about this great time that’ll be had that night.
IDEA #90 - Footer Ads in Email
November 11, 2008 | 3 Comments
Why should Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and others, be the only ones earning money from footer ads? The user should make some money too — and it’d be fine if there was 1 more ad in the footer — maybe even a visual banner ad (a la RSS feeds).
The real question is how to accomplish this, and that is likely why it has never happened. You might need a browser plugin that would see when you send off an email — and you’d likely have a black-list of recipients that you don’t want to receive the ad in the footer.
This brings me back to my one idea about user-approved advertising (which Facebook has done now in a sense with Beacon). These ads in the footer of your email don’t have to be meaningless from you (the sender), they could be things (sites you use; products you’ve purchased) in your footer. They could be your commerce-related “tweets” from Twitter; or from your Facebook newsfeed.
Don’t forget about Outlook — this might be an easier plugin to use.
But plugins are a barrier for most people to use your service. So it might be that the service providers themselves (Hotmail, Gmail, etc) would have to give you this functionality…. unless you have another idea?
As always, all of these ideas are here to stimulate other ideas. Use the comments section to give more ideas for this idea — and by all means, if you feel one of these ideas is worthy of your precious time, then go on an execute on any one of them.
IDEA #89 - Clouds in the Sky
November 7, 2008 | 4 Comments
Alright, I’ll admit — this idea is simple and possibly weak. It’s not even mine, it’s my buddy Bob’s idea.
How many cloud photographs exist? And have you ever looked at a cloud and saw something, and someone else saw something else? It might look like a cow, or a cat with a hat on, etc.
What about a site kind of like LOLCats that allows you to caption cloud photos? Or simply comment on them as to what you see.
Could be a fun, mindless site in a matter where you just keep clicking through each photo.
IDEA #88 - Rent Your Twitter Background & Avatar
November 4, 2008 | 1 Comment
I’m going to put three(!) ideas in here that are quick. The Twitter API has now given access to your profile background image (update_profile_background_image), profile avatar (update_profile_image), and profile design colors (update_profile_colors). Apparently Ian Schafer already attempted doing this on a one-off basis via eBay, but it looks like eBay pulled the auction.
The advertiser side of the equation: They will want to go through a directory of users, likely categorized by # of followers, and/or by the geo-location of the user’s followers (which can be found-out via the API), and/or by keyword phrases the user tends to mention in their tweets.
The publisher (typical user that’s renting their bg/avatar) side of the equation: the user would login with their Twitter credentials and simply approve (or enable auto-approve) of ads. And/or notifications are sent to user by email that an advertiser wishes to rent their space and then easily displays to the user whether they approve for the specific amount.
Payment by PayPal would be efficient.
Unfortunately, the Twitter API doesn’t allow for easy updating of a user’s bio or user’s URL — so there’s no real way to link back to the advertiser, unless the latest tweet referred to the advertiser’s promo.
Bonus Idea #2: This is a lot simpler, but requires TwitPic to do it, or someone to duplicate TwitPic. When I send in a photo from my cell phone via TwitPic, why not allow me to send in the photo to a different email address (or the same, but with a ‘#bg’ in the title of the photo sent in) and then TwitPic makes that my new background image for my profile. Could do the same with ‘#av’ for my avatar.
Bonus Idea #3: With the API, you could create a simple 1-page website that allows a Twitter user to easily switch-out their background image or profile avatar, with 1-click. If my Twitter login/pw is stored with your website, then I could easily click on a different profile avatar image (that I uploaded, and/or that you offered up) or background image. My thought: what about a simple designation of ‘offline’ and ‘online’? Basically, you could grab my current avatar, and then create a version where the text ‘online’ is on it somewhere [show me like 4 variations and I'll pick whether I want that text in upper/lower left/right corner] and ‘offline’ is on it somewhere. Maybe ‘offline’ image is now in grayscale.
The one problem with this online/offline thing is — who is going to change their routine to click ‘offline’ before signing-off for the day?
There could be other images for holidays — this could pull your background image and apply a Halloween theme to it; or snow flakes (for winter). Or maybe it checks the current weather in your city/state/country and posts it right in the image itself for the day (or through-out the day, updating it).
It may also tweet out for the user that their profile or bg image was changed using (your service name) — so that you can get some awareness/credit and more users. [and/or post in the header/footer of the user's background image]
You may be able to apply this same idea to a user’s MySpace or Facebook profile too. You’d have to look into those API’s.
