A LIKE Button For All Messages

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cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Sharon Drummond

At first, I thought this would be a good idea for text messages. The way I see it, you could just tap and hold the sender’s message and would be presented with the option to like it, which would then alert the sender.*

But then I thought that a thumbs up emoticon does essentially the same thing right now as far as “liking” a text is concerned, so I’m not sure how necessary this feature is with emoji.

With email, however, this idea may make a little more sense. Instead of having to respond with “Great!” or “Thanks!” or “That’s hilarious!,” wouldn’t it be great just to click on a thumbs up icon, or a heart, or a +1  (for GMail) and have that displayed as a notification in the upper or lower right-hand corner of the sender’s browser window when they are logged into their email account? 

This way, these simple acknowledgments wouldn’t clutter up your inbox and could be received whilst composing or reading other email.

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*Alternatively, you could be presented with three options for a quick reply. The first is to like the message, which may send the user your emoticon of choice or a custom platform-based icon. The second option is to simply acknowledge the message, which would reply “OK” or something similar, and the third option would be to reply with a laugh—which would reply with “haha” or “lol.” These are all two click options that would cover a significant portion of replies. Plus, if you could customize one or two of the three options, you could make this feature fit with your particular style of messaging.

Two Essential Features For Question & Answer Services


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ViaMoi

I’ve spent some time on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and similar sites, but the one thing that continues to frustrate me while I use them is that there are so many similar questions with similar answers, and there are so many answers delivered as attempts at humor or cleverness which do not really address the intent of the person asking the question, and therefore are clutter on the page.

These sites, however, seem sold on the idea of retaining everything within a question in some form. If you are trying to provide a service where people can get great answers to good questions, you need to be able to remove material that is not providing that value. I’m not talking about deleting controversial answers; those should remain available. But let the material of no substance go away. If you just gray it out and tell me it was downvoted, I don’t know whether it was controversial or just junk, so I still have to invest in clicking it and reading it. This is undesirable.

Secondly, and most importantly, there must be a way for two similar questions asked to be merged. Consider the following questions:

  1. How do I learn to play the guitar?
  2. What specific things should beginners focus on when learning guitar?
  3. What’s the first thing you should master when learning to play the guitar?

These are three actual individual questions on Quora right now. Quora and other QA sites become more difficult to navigate if these similar questions are not merged into one question. There is also the value added of increasing the likelihood of finding the one really great answer if you merge the questions.

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Choose Your Own Texting Adventure


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk

Your smartphone gets a bit smarter.

When you receive a text message, your phone comprehends it—and here’s where it gets interesting—attempts to generate a reply for you. In the beginning, it is only able to recognize simple YES or NO questions and give you the option of replying either way, with some styling based on how you replied to other YES or NO questions, e.g., “Sure!” or “Nope.”

After a while, however, the phone will be able to construct simple replies based on how you’ve responded to similar texts in the past, taking into account the time of day, who you are responding to, and various other factors.

Of course, it always gives you the option to click a button, bypass the generated response, and compose one of your own. Sometimes, it might give you up to three options to choose from.

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PS: I realize the title of this post suggests another idea, viz, actually making a choose your own adventure that can be played via short text messages and simple alphanumerical replies. You could do that, but you would probably be better off making that an app.

Scheduling Tweets Within Twitter


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by ed10vi

A lot of Twitter users who publish content want to be able to schedule a bunch of tweets for publication at a later time and do so in an easy way and preferably in one sitting. While there are some third-party applications that will do this to some degree, I think Twitter could add this feature internally with relative ease.

Here’s one way it could work: At the end of the tweet, a user would type an asterisk followed by a number followed by one letter that designates a unit of time. For example, adding *45m to the end of a tweet would schedule the tweet for 45 minutes from the current time. Adding *6h schedules for 6 hours later, *10d schedules a tweet for 10 days later. and *52w schedules the tweet for a full year later (52 weeks). Perhaps you stop it there, or maybe you go a bit further and allow something like *18 which would schedule for the next time the 24-hour clock hit 1800 hours, i.e., 6 PM.

These characters would be stripped from the final published tweet and would not count against the character limit. Also, this would allow everyone to use the feature regardless of which method or app they currently use to post to twitter.

And speaking of Twitter, your should follow me on Twitter.

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Instant Online Book Clubs And Discussion Groups


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Swamibu

Here’s an idea that tests the “everything exists somewhere online” theory that I just made up and, by virtue of the theory, others must have made up elsewhere online too. 

Imagine, you’re reading a book. For many people, I could just stop right there, but lets assume you’re an avid reader. So, while you’re reading the book, you realize you’d like to talk with other people who are, at the same time, reading the same book.

You’d go to a website, or this service could be integrated into your reading device (I dislike e-terms like e-book and e-reader), and you would enter the title or ISBN of the book you are reading (again, your reading device could do this automatically), and you’d be instantly linked with other people around the world who are interested in discussing the book, whether by chat or by video.

In the beginning, the site would need to grow before it reached the critical mass that would make finding other readers instantaneous, so you’d just list two or three books that you were considering reading to create a small group before you actually started reading one of them.

Why would this work? Because someone else somewhere is reading, just finished reading, or is about to read the same book you are. There are tremendous opportunities for advertising and affiliate sales along the way, and a lot of it could be built on existing social platforms.

Boom! I just made someone a millionaire, or maybe a hundred-thousandaire.

Incidentally, I’ve seen nothing like this online (just old style “let’s all pick a book and talk about it” clubs, or “pick from these eight books to discuss” websites), but given the theory outlined at the beginning, the idea must be buried in some small corner of the Internet. Wait a minute—this blog is that small corner of the Internet!

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The Decider

What if there was a decision making program you trusted more than your own thought process (or at lest equally), that not only told you what you want and need, but why you want it or need it? It’s the logical extension of preference profiling, social networking, data mining, heuristic analysis, and dynamic “learning” algorithms.

It wouldn’t just be making recommendations based on previous behavior, e.g., we recommend this book because you bought this other book, but rather based on anticipated behavior. It wouldn’t just serve you content, it would have a conversation with you. It’s taking a search engine, a social network, artificial (and perhaps personal) intelligence, an advertising platform, and a retailer—and throwing them in a blender.

Oddly enough, this idea is from my Spring 2009 notebook, and a website called Hunch launched later that same year, which is quite similar to what I had in mind. Hunch makes recommendations based on a profile you create. This could easily go off on a tangent about data portability and how your actual profile is much better than anything you can create from scratch in a few questions, but enough of that.

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cc licensed flickr photo shared by ramyo

ME: What’s up?

DE: You should use Turbotax to do your taxes.

ME: Not today. What else?

DE: You should buy NIke red tennis shoes from Zappos for $129.

ME: Um …

DE: You need a new pair of shoes.

ME: Well, yeah.

DE: And, you only have $150 to spend.

ME: True.

DE: Shoes will give you the greatest value for the money.

ME: I see. But, why tennis shoes?

DE: Because you already have relatively new dress shoes and casual footwear.

ME: Got it. Red?

DE: It’s your favorite color.

ME: I love you.

DE: I know.

A Ghost In The Machine

If you made a computer program that sent [on your behalf] random emails, texts, and comments, how long could you get away with it?

That’s the line from my frist Moleskine cahier notebook, but we could use some elaboration. Essentially, the idea is to construct a computer program that learns your writing style from your emails, text messages, comments around the web, social networking updates, &c., and is somehow intelligent enough to compose what it sees as likely new messages. As soon as you flip the switch, you have an artificial self posing as you in the online world, that posts new things at random times. The question, then, was how long could this charade last before it was detected?

I like the idea because it seems like an interesting way to make a substantial piece of commentary about how real you can appear to others as long as you are active online.


cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by thelunch_box

A friend of mine, Brian Brushwood, recently thought of something along the same lines—he calls it Afterlyfe. What a great name! According to his website, the process is activated upon Brian’s death! From the site:

Once I stop checking in, Afterlyfe will assume I’ve kicked the bucket, and go into action, taking control of my facebook and twitter pages.

From that point on, Afterlyfe will use all my previous tweets and facebook updates to recreate a digital simulacrum of my life. The goal is to make me the world’s first virtual ghost.

For starters, we’re going to keep it simple:  the default settings will be that the moment I die, Afterlyfe will make an exact copy of my last year in tweets, and release them at the exact times they were originally posted, year after year.  Every year, followers will see me complain about taxes come mid April.  You’ll get my same Christmas tweets. Happy birthday wishes I made in the past will continue to arrive, year after year, right on schedule.

Now, Brian and I never spoke about this before he revealed his project, and I give him 100 percent of the credit for coming up with his idea; this isn’t that kind of post. I do think, however, that merging both ideas could create something even more compelling than both on their own. That is, use the concept of activating the program upon death with the idea of intelligent software that generates new material to post.

With a sufficiently advanced program, you could have some amazing things happen. I think you could continue to learn new things about someone after their death—from them!

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PS: I bet Facebook dies before Brian does.