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Open Source Ideas
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
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Synchronised Podcasts
This must exist somewhere. I just can't find it.
I listen to a lot of podcasts in a week and I use quite a few different computers. One desktop at home, one laptop while out and about and a PC and an iMac at work. I want some service (or combination of web service and application) that I can use to manage my podcast subscriptions regarless of where I am.
At the moment, I have iTunes installed on my desktop, my laptop and the iMac at work and I have subscribed to my collection of podcasts in each of them. I want to be able to plug in my iPod and have it delete the podcasts I've listened to and get the latest episodes of each of my subscriptions. At the moment, I plug it into the desktop, copy on the latest 'Planet Money' and listen. A couple of days later, there's another episode released so I plug into my laptop and it offers the episode I've just finished listening to and the new one. A few days later, I'm working on the office iMac and plug in my iPod, it suggests the last weeks-worth of episodes. I have to manually go into every subscription and drag over the individual files that I want to listen to.
What I'd like to have is a web site where I can put in my podcast subscriptions and it will track the latest episodes of each. I can then either point iTunes to this site so that I can point all my installations at it or it will provide an application which can be used to put the latest episodes onto my iPod. When I plug in my iPod, the application tells the site which ones I've listened to and it removes them from my listening queue. The application could, also be stored on the iPod itself to enable it to be used wherever the iPod is plugged in, not just on computers with iTunes.
Am I explaining myself clearly enough? It just seems so simple, it should already exists within iTunes. It is entirely possible that Apple's recent acquisition of Lala could be the first step in an online iTunes which would solve these problems. If anyone has any suggestions for the best way to achieve this, please let me know. I thought of a way of doing it with Dropbox but it would only work if the music bit of my iTunes library weren't bigger than my Dropbox account.
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Crowdsourced Weather
This is a more general version of the #uksnow map idea. It's a crowd-sourced weather map which relies on the fact that any one individual tweet about the weather might be inaccurate but given a large enough sample, enough people will mention the weather in their area to make this a workable idea. It doesn't require people to tweet in a particular format.
To get info
Have an array of weather words in various languages (rain, hail, snow, schnee, ame, yuki) every 5 minutes: foreach weatherword search twitter for that word http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=rain retrieve latest 100 tweets foreach get user info http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=username get user.location if available geocode save: username, time, lat, long, geotude, weatherword Remove any tweets about this weatherword older than 6 hours.
To display info
Show a Google map Based on current Zoom level, split the current map into about 100 geotudes foreach geotude search database for any weather results for that block (probably using an ilike "1234%" on the geotude field) sort by weatherword count descending draw an icon on top of that block to show the most common weatherword If the user zooms in, recalculate geotudes and repeat.
I quite like that this uses geotudes which I think are an excellent idea.
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TV Mark
A site which track which episodes of TV shows you have watched. You create an account and enter the name of a TV show (AJAX completed, naturally). Before the show is associated with your account, you are shown a list of broadcast episodes and you must select the latest one you have watched. You can add as many shows as you like. When you visit the site, you see something like the visual here (although with the design not totally ripped from Automatic) so you can instantly tell what the next unseen episode is.
You can ask to be notified when a new episode is broadcast in a variety of ways (twitter, e-mail, rss). Shows can be broadcast anywhere in any country and so to get around the problem of detecting when a show is broadcast, the site actually follows a collection of well-known torrent providers. Note: this site doesn't provide any links to torrents or video files, it just relies on the fact that shows usually turn up on the torrent scene shortly after they have been broadcast. You can buy episodes or seasons from iTunes or Amazon links provided next to your tracking panel.
The visual isn't great as there will also be some big button on each show panel to increment the last show watched.
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Multi-platform herding game.
You start off by choosing a type of animal to herd. These could be real animals or could be similar to real animals but more quirky (and therefore fun). You can start with 15 hens or 8 sheep or 6 pigs, etc. You then are given a top-down (or possibly zelda-style top down-ish) view of your herder and your animals.and you've just to get them from one side of a map to the other. All fine so far, yes? This is the gist of the single-player version. With each trip across the map, you get a gold coin which you can use to buy more animals or customise the ones you have (spray-paint the sheep, buy a new smock for your herder, etc).
The main bit of the game comes when you go online. Each install of the game has a unique map which is your own home field. When you go online, you can either invite people to come to your field or you can wander off to other people's fields and interact with them. An interesting bit of it is that you can leave your herder and herd to wander off themselves. If you're on a desktop, your herder wanders off whenever the screensaver comes on and you can choose to passively watch as it interacts with other herders on other machines, if you've got a mobile device, you can choose to send your little guy off when you close the game and the central server will track interactions while you're offline. When you start up again, you can choose to see where your herd went. There's also the possibility of having a flash piece which will just let viewers on the website passively watch.
I think it would also help if there was some system in place so that people's fields could be next to each other, you'd wander off the side of your field and into your neighbour's. If the neighbour stopped playing for a while, the next new player would move in. That way, you could zoom out and see the entire game world.
It's not as simple idea as my last game design (blob-pushing-around touch-screen, flash crossover thing) but that one has been done now (by someone else). I did actually make this game (above) about seven years ago and it was surprisingly fun but I didn't have the marketing budget to promote it (i.e. none). There are some interesting algorithms you can implement in order to get good herd behaviour. It doesn't need to be strictly accurate so you can get some cartoon-ish wandering-off, notice herd is far away, running after them behaviour.
