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Huh...that actually would be really handy.

Problems:

-How would you deal with people who aren't 'in the know' enough to earn back points?

-How would you prevent them just creating a new account to get more points?

-Chicken and Egg Problem: It's not reasonable to hire enough people to pre-verify that a post is correct in saying 'Event XYZ has just occurred'. The best solution, to my mind, is to allow the receiver ('wants-to-know person') to verify. How do you prevent people from 'griefing' by repeatedly saying a major event has just occurred, thus SMS spamming a bunch of people who want to know, say, when Spore is released? You could wait for multiple people to say something just happened, but then you create a sort of latency, especially for less-heavily-watched items, and you totally blow the chance to get inside scoops.

-Define 'timely manner'. And do you get points even if you're not the first to say that an event has occurred?

Your idea would be viable in terms of income, though, I would think. Charge software companies to become members, and then create a few never-expiring general-purpose event types for 'exploit found', 'POC posted', 'Code Stolen', etc., while giving them, say, a 3-day advance before anybody else watching those things or similar ones gets notified.

Excellent feedback points, thanks!

-How would you deal with people who aren't 'in the know' enough to earn back points?

Maybe there could also be a way to buy points? I'm not sure if that would be demotivating or not though. Alternativly I would think some of the tasks require nothing more than going to a website and determining if something has happened, e.g., new homestarrunner cartooon.

-How would you prevent them just creating a new account to get more points?

Maybe only allow one account per email address / sms address?

-Chicken and Egg Problem ...

How about this, if you correctly report when an event has happened you get X points (perhaps related to the number of people subscribed to the event) But if you get reported as inaccurate, you lose points.

-Define 'timely manner'. And do you get points even if you're not the first to say that an event has occurred?

How about we accept as many reports of as event happening as people submit. The first person gets the points, but if the first person is found to be inaccurate, then the second person gets them, and so on down the list?

-monetizing ideas: I like your charging for delayed updates for bugs idea. Other options could be to sell points, or perhaps have a premium account that gets a short head start. Also product release notifications could make heavy use of affilite income.

If people submit events which other people vote up or down then "x has happened" simply becomes "x has 10 votes".

So it's like the probability that x has happened? That's an interesting way to to do it.

I like this idea as well, especially as a facebook app. Use the Facebook api to scrape together an initial group of events pertinent to an individual user and have them mold it from there.

Problem: Right now when I want to know when something happens (new cd/movie release) i go to a reliable source and I know with some degree of certianty that that event will happen when they say it will. I give them some reasonable leeway since its still a future event with numerous opportunities to miss the date(later ship date, cancellation, etc.). However, when you tell someone an event just happened or is happening now, you better be 90% correct or the tool becomes an annoyance instead of useful.

The real gem would be if you could find a way to figure out what they might want to be notified about without them having to specifically request it. For example, say I want to know when 24 is coming to DVD, but I've only used your site once and I don't think to go and add it. Maybe you can use the Facebook API, see that one of my favorite shows is 24, and then any new notifications relating to 24 get directed to me. This is of course just one example.

Just a thought...

You may well be on to something there - I think this would do very well as a facebook app.

This is interesting, and sounds a bit semantic web-ish even :) You could maybe use something like Greenspun's Solar Magnitude Forum to find things that are closer to your interests as well.

I think this is actually quite a good idea - better than truemors certainly. I recently had an idea to notify people when new series of their favourite tv shows hit the screens - I know there are usually many promos but for some reason I still tend to miss them. What you are proposing takes the concept beyond just TV shows and I think it could very likely work. I say go for it.

Hmm, that could be the motto: "EventKnower- It's better than Truemors!" :-)

I take it you already got the domain name?

No, no domain name yet. Why do you ask?

b/c if you don't grab it now (unless you were thinking to launching with a different name) someone else will grab it (especially if there's a jerk reading your post on yc news - hopefully not)

Being open with ideas is fine, b/c execution of an idea is hard (even with "easy" ideas). Grabbing a domain name or even trademarking a name is a lot easier.

Yeah, it's a really bad idea to post an unregistered domain name in a public forum. Grab it right now, you can get the .net and .org later.

www.namecheap.com is my registrar of choice, $8.88 a year with free WhoisGuard (anonymizes your whois information in a way that won't allow someone to steal your domain).

That is a good deal. I'll use that in the future. I'd say there's only say, a 20% chance I'd want to use that name, and then there's only say a 30% chance I'll do this idea, so I'm not sure if I'll buy it just yet.

It's worth paying the extra $.89 over GoDaddy just because the checkout process isn't painful.

Do you guys have any ideas on how to market / promote something like this?

I think a lot of the marketing has to do with the prodct and the interface. I think this is something that you build first and then take it to sources - ie - Paramount Movie Studio. Whenever a movie or TV DVD is released they let your website know.

The marketing: On their 24 page "Want us to remind you as soon as 24 season 3 is on DVD? Get a free reminder with ____.com. As you grow build it out so that any organization can customize for any product or event and then put it on their site.

EventKnower - Know the uknowable the instant it happens (feedback on my idea)