A private gift list that you can update with gifts that you want to get for others at the appropriate time and the links of where to buy them. A period before the time itself, it reminds you to buy the gifts.
I’m going to be posting some ideas generated at a hackathon that I recently participated in at my college. It was a 24 hour ruby on rails extravaganza, preceded by an ideation session. Most of these ideas are not my own. With that being said, the first idea:
An online list that multiple people can update with groceries/supplies that they need, and the ability for one member to mark off the items that he or she bought for the group.
I belong to many e-mail lists at my college that contain e-mails that “expire” after a certain amount of time— 5 minutes, an hour, a day, a week… It would be cool to have a feature where the author of the e-mail could set an e-mail expiration date and a script on my computer would calculate when to delete these e-mails. It would be a great way of dealing with a good chunk of the 100+ e-mails a day that I get.
As I mentioned yesterday, I get distracted on Wikipedia quite a bit. Some navigations between pages are relevant, but often times I get distracted by some other link. I think a good way to tell if a link is relevant or a distraction is to measure the number of pages that are linked to by both the page I’m on and the page I’m going to. In other words, if the two pages are fairly “close”, then they could well be on topic— if not, perhaps an alert can remind me to get back to work if I’m browsing something totally unrelated and useless to my current project.
I get distracted on facebook, wikipedia and e-mail a lot, and easily lose a lot of productivity to them. It would be nice to have a javascript or in-browser alert that makes me wait five minutes to access the facebook domain. It could be disabled if it was necessary, but 99% of the time, I’m going there impulsively and not quite focused. And this could be enough to stop me during those times.
Using Google documents to make a survey is a great experience, but it’s kind of slow going to enter any serious number of questions. It would be cool to see the analogue of wiki formatting applied to a survey— i.e. to make a radio button question, write the question, then type tab-“o”-space before every possible answer.
I’d like to see a website that allows users to make a timeline of their life. It would allow me to post things like individual photos, photo albums, short text entires, longer text entries, and attached documents. It would be good for visualization of what I’m producing, what I’m doing, how I’m spending my time, and other life statistics..
I got in the bad habit of updating this thing every day. Of course, that can only last so long (see the previous post). So what would be really nice is a service that will provide a daily e-mail at whatever time you would like (perhaps nightly at 10 pm) that would remind you to do all the things you need to do once per day— update your tumblr, read your rss, etc.
Riding razor scooters can be a fun way to get around, but whenever you try and prop them up against a wall, the handlebars turn 90 degrees, making the wheels perpendicular to each other, and then the scooter falls over. Instead, have a small kickstand that’s on the front column of the scooter that you can fold down with your foot to allow the scooter to stand without falling.
In an effort to avoid the attention of spam bots, many sites display e-mail addresses as simple images that just show the address. I’d like to see a site that publicly does this. You pass it some information about the address, and it checks to see if it has the image. Otherwise, it makes one up. Either way, you can have your e-mail image given to you. This service could be charged for. Also, is something like this possible in javascript?
