Where do you find ideas? How should I go about finding ideas for software to make?

What are your goals?

If your goals are to gain experience and make money going the startup route, you don't HAVE to be the one with the idea if you're capable of implementing the ideas of others. For best results, you just need to be able to RECOGNIZE a good idea that is presented to you and generate enough passion about said idea that you can make it the focus of your life for awhile.

There are people that have the opposite problem that you have...they have tons of good ideas (and maybe contacts and money), but lack the skills to implement them. Find those people. Start a company with them. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually, you'll tend to rub off on each other and you will gain skills in generating good business ideas on your own...

I'd recommend to build something YOU need: it's always the best way to make sure you're building something useful.

Copy an existing market leader, then as you're developing your software, create new features that distinguish you from the competition.

Talk to people. Tell them you're starting a company. Lay out an idea. It doesn't have to be good. It's been my experience that this scenario triggers an irresistible impulse in the other person to tell you _their_ ideas. Sooner or later, you'll hear something interesting. Explore it and refine it.

The biggest mistakes you can make, IMO, are (a.) thinking your idea is too stupid to start with, and (b.) keeping it a secret. The idea you start with almost certainly won't be what you finish with; the important thing is to get started. And if you don't talk about it, you'll never really explore, refine or (as you'll almost certainly need to) abandon it for something better.

Most people have something interesting to say. Find out what it is.

Find something you love to do but is being done in a bad way... then, fix it.

Good Luck

You find ideas in one of several ways: 1) you bricolage them together from reading a lot in a wide range of topics or 2) you think long and hard about a single problem you want to solve. In the former, you come up with something interesting and new because it's an unexpected and novel recombination of ideas normally not found in the same place (cross-discipline). For the latter, you will cover a large and interesting search space where you hopefully find a number of interesting ideas that each taken by itself gives you just a small part of the solution.

Every time you find yourself/someone else disappointed with something, or unable to do something, instead of thinking "That's just how things are I suppose" ask yourself "Could I fix this situation if I really tried?"

Write the ideas down. Look over your list. Pick the one that seems the most interesting AND has the best (clearest/easiest) method of distribution.

Analyse existing systems. Divide them into subideas, and mash up them.

For instance, Gmail is a MUA with good spam filter, keeping e-mails in threads. So, why not create a blog reader that keeps discussions between bloggers in threads, making it easy to follow?

Well, I have a couple of ideas I would like to see implemented and little time to work on all of them. I'm not promising they're great ideas but it's software that I would use if it were available. If you're interested send me an email.

understand the problems being solved by existing services. Come up with a different/better solution. Key is understanding problem domain - me thinks.

generally they come from your head.