IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook)

By Steve Poland • September 6, 2007

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 #71 - User-Gen Opinionated Videos, Photos, or Text (Facebook App) 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...
IDEA #72 - Digg for Facebook Photos 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...
IDEA #69 - Get Users Pulling Info From Others (Facebook App) 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...
IDEA #75 - Where I Hang Out (facebook app) I’m submitting this in the pool of ideas for Startup Weekend NYC this coming weekend. The Idea: Where I Hang Out (fb app) The Concept: Users specify the bars/restaurants/coffee joints that they frequent. Thus I...
Facebook API Question: Access of Friend Photos? If anyone has experience with the Facebook API — I’m curious about two calls (maybe more): friends.get and photos.get [and possibly photos.getAlbums]. What I’m trying to do is have a logged-in FB user, in my...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

5 Responses to “IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook)”

joe laz on September 6th, 2007 12:50 am (perm link)

I like this idea… not as a business, but as a fun social experiment along the lines of Post Secret. You could probably manage it with a regular Facebook Group - no real need for an app necessarily.
Robert on September 6th, 2007 1:46 am (perm link)

This is so simple and so silly it would probably be brilliantly successful. One suggestion, maybe make the suggestions votable. Meaning allow users to submit suggestions, people vote on those which make it to the front page (or whatever) THEN have people go and do them.
Kevin on September 12th, 2007 11:27 am (perm link)

I was at a music fest in Seattle over Labor Day and heard of this art project that was doing something very similar. People loved the concept, but gaining awareness is a big problem. Doing this through Facebook would be huge - great idea!

http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com
» 100+ Web Start-up Business Ideas - By Steve Poland - web startup ideas and brainstorms, straight up! (formerly Techquila Shots) on April 29th, 2009 10:44 am (perm link)

[...] IDEA #68 - Instructing Users to Collectively Participate (Facebook) [...]
Pascal on May 9th, 2009 10:41 am (perm link)

I bet it would work as a buisness if the silly thing you do each day is a contest. The key to this idea is to find willing sponsors, and I bet that if the website gain popularity it will be feasible. Nice idea, yet so simple!