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Comment by JangoSteve | Hacker News Reader

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

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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"."""

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