6 Web App Ideas Off My Chest | Hacker News Reader

6 Web App Ideas Off My Chest

nilkanth.com

39 pointsnreece40 comments

I thought about 4 out of these 6 ideas myself over the years and that makes me realize even more that a truly unique idea is a very rare thing. Ideas are so worthless, unless they are related to HOW you go about implementing one of these obvious already-thought-of ideas.

Does anybody know of a site where you can go and find out what apps already exist that implemented your idea? I'm sure that a lot of people wouldn't use it because you have to divulge your idea to find out whether it's been done before, but I for one would find it incredibly useful. If this doesn't exist, I'm going to build it. Wait a minute, forget I said that.

Does anybody know of a site where you can go and find out what apps already exist that implemented your idea?

Google?

(Obviously this isn't ideal because the person who implemented your idea may not have implemented SEO to target your idea in your words, but I couldn't resist.)

It doesn't work that well. At all. Try googling for any of the six ideas the OP listed and see if you can find any if not all of the apps out there that implement them.

I've got buyagoal, buymygoal, sellagoal and sellmygoal.com for sale if someone wants to start trading goals ...

E.g. 'If you can: make me lose X pounds in Y weeks, I'll pay you Z'

It's a better business model .... ;)

I've always wanted the following:

A site I can "commit" to a goal buy sending money. I assign a friend I trust to update the site (let's say every week) on whether I'm fulfilling my commitment (exercising, dieting, etc.) As long as I keep my goal, I don't pay the money. If I don't meet my goal a certain week, 50% of my money goes to charity, 50% to the site (or some such percentage).

I've read a variation on this where you commit money to a charity you hate, to motivate yourself toward your goal, or literally your enemies win.

Check out: http://www.stickk.com/tour.php

You can pick a goal, set the stakes, select the friend you trust, and even get supporters -- all based on ideas from the field of behavioral economics.

Thanks for pointing out this website! I was looking for similar website to encourage bunch of 30 something friends to exercise. How do they earn money? What is the business model here?

b2b potentially, according to this article: http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/30/stickk-raises-more-funding-...

Nice, very similar to what I have in mind. Thanks for the link!

I'm all for sharing web app ideas (and ideas in general), but I get the feeling this person didn't Google for any of these ideas before posting this. Reading through, I had at least one existing website come to mind for each one.

1. Carpooling: zimride.com

2. Comments Aggregation: backtype.com (sort of, perhaps this is one not actually done)

3. Social Goals: 43things.com

4. Feedback for Startups: could be done with getsatisfaction.com and surveygizmo.com (in fact I've used surveygizmo.com's API to offer incentives in RateMyStudentRental.com for completing the survey, took about 15min to setup)

5. Food photos: there are actually many more than I came up with initially, just scan the rest of this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1366785)

6. Integrated Blogging Environment: Tumblr.com does most of that, then there are also apps like the ScribeFire extension for Firefox

I totally agree. I'm also all for discussion, but I think he makes a mistake when he tries to imply they are special at all and other people should "go for" them / are "free to use them". Some of these ideas have been around for ~10 years. I actually posted a comment at the link critiquing along these lines. He moderated the comment out. I don't blame him because the comment was pretty straightforward in calling him unoriginal. The original comment:

"""Yeah, I'm reading back now trying to figure if you're just being sarcastic or trolling. But I guess you must not be. Listen, most of those ideas, save the comment aggregation one as far as I know, have been around for ever and have in fact been done and have gone through iterations. I'd go down the list because there's something to say about all of them but I don't want to take the time. I'd just suggest that you use google. Maybe throw out a few things: erideshare.com ; 43things.com / weightwatchers (not a whole lot to do with game theory but that does sound smart); blogger.com is wsywg ; gastroporn as primary content hasn't (yet) worked in a big way despite being tried a few times (radar.net / other mobile photo sharing sites with food channels).; uservoice.com and it's competition. Coupon incentives are sleazy. It's important to have ideas and to talk about them. That's great. But you can't really say these are your original ideas. There's like, a lot of prior art on all of these. It almost seems like you're hoping in 10 or 15 years you can point girls to this blog post and be like "See, I just gave those guys my ideas back in 2010 cause that's what kind of a guy I am, and they did em. I'm the seed planter." or somesuch (crack inspired?) reattribution. It's probably not going to work. But hey - a piece of good advice that should shine through this critique (I hope): Just work on your own stuff. If you have good ideas show it. Do it. Anyone can write a few paragraphs about websites that are already way in existence and pretend like they just got something "off their chest"."""

Feedback for Startups is intriguing because the pain is definitely there but this approaches it from the wrong perspective. How can we help startups get feedback from potential users in their target market, not just those seeking incentives for doing simple tasks?

There's already at least a few feedback sites out there. There's that one with the orange "Feedback" tab I've seen some places, that pops out from the side. I can't remember the name. But perhaps none of them do what's described in this article.

That's UserVoice.

http://survey.io/

Commenting on the idea is fun but not productive. Address the real issue: why are you standing there doing nothing? Fear of failure? Lack necessary skills? No partner? Address these things, one at a time, and that's progress.

I like the comment idea, but focused on the user posting. For example, I'd like to put up a page in my blog that aggregates pretty much everything I've ever written online, ever. That way, I could have a "collected writings" page that will show my comments on various blogs, on HN, on reddit, maybe reviews I've written for Amazon, etc.

There are some technical difficulties with doing this automatically (how will you find every comment I ever post on any old blog?). But this would definitely be a cool way to aggregate all my writing into one place. It could also have controls letting me exclude certain writings, etc.

car pooling app - http://avego.com

My carpool app for Ireland: http://getthere.ie/ To solve the chicken and egg problem it's built on top of a public transport info site.

Yay, Ireland ... I'm in Cork

have you thought about advertising to hostels?, this could be very useful to travellers looking for rides ...

p.s. The bus eireann site is a completely ridiculous joke!!!, how did you get around that issue?

What's your business model? I.e. how do you make money!

And here I went, "So, all six of these are being done by someone, so why don't we have a web application directory?"

In comes google with three of them. http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/ http://appuseful.com/ http://www.go2web20.net/

Now, if only they were comprehensive... Makeuseof is pretty cool, though.

goal setting - http://www.43things.com/

I agree, the comment aggregator has some merit.

Integrated blogging, I like that. Useful for content mills. Just look at the amount of value created by Associated Content. $20m per year of existence.

Comments Aggregation: http://www.cocomment.com/

cocomment seems to aggregate with respect to the person making the comments. Does anything aggregate comments with respect to the thing being commented on?

Given an interesting bit of content, it gets posted on a variety of sites that support commenting on links (Digg/Reddit/HN/...) and frequently the comments are actually more interesting than the original content so getting a unified version of those would be nice and something I'd probably use.

> Does anything aggregate comments with respect to the thing being commented on?

http://co.mments.com

I was going to include that in my post but the site is down. Still seems to be. So I just assumed they'd gone under because I hadn't heard of them for a year or so.. Know anything to the contrary?

I like the comment aggregator idea. Thought of it some time ago as well; it'd be really neat.

So does everybody else, which explains why there are 460 of these sites up today. None of them have critical mass, so they're all completely useless. And since there's really no good way to make money doing it, nobody big enough to gain critical mass is going to take it on.

perhaps what is needed is not another central commenting site, but rather a site that aggregates the comments of hackernews, slashdot, reddit etc. as well as phpbb forums on the webpage of the original post

So I place a commenting widget on my blog and interlieved in the comments on the original post are the discussions from other websites that point to the same url.

How will you make money with any of them?

I like the food idea.

in japanese but someone already started. http://www.foodlog.jp/

http://www.fiddme.com/

http://biggestmenu.com/

http://tastespotting.com/

http://nom.ms/

checkout zimride.com for the carpooling idea

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