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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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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.
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Twampaign?
A v. simple 'put together a twitter campaign' site (twampaign.com or whatever). You sign up, choose a subdomain (e.g. http://ihateie6.twampaign.com/ ) and give it a list of hashtags, phrases, words and accounts it should keep track of. You then upload a header image, a couple of paragraphs of description, choose a colour scheme and advertise it.
New twitter campaign (or pretty monitoring software) in 2 minutes. Shazam.
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VoteSocial
VoteSocial
A 'create your own vote' social media site.
Users can create a subdomain of (for example) comptwitition.com and create their own user-votable competition. The emphasis will be on inter-city/international competitions (my city has better manhole covers than yours, for instance)
When creating a competition, admin makes a competition rules page (choosing from a preset list of rules) an about page (premise of competition), chooses whether the competition is geographical or not and defines the level at which geographical competitions takes place (intercity/international/city street/etc).
If it is a geocomp, any image uploaded must be placed on a google map (or if it has LatLong EXIF, use that) and will then have the category (side in the competition) suggested. This should be overwriteable if necessary.
Images can be uploaded either directly via the site, via an iPhone app, having a flickr URL entered or a twitpic url entered. Entries can also be emailed or tweeted @comptwitition.
Votes are done via a tweet entered on the site. The tweet would be @comptwitition and include the user's vote and a shorturl to the entry page.
