Ideas I Don't Have Time For

Tracking Twitter Chatter, Via Short URLs

Ideas I Don’t Have Time For - 002 - Chatter Around ShortURLs from charliepark on Vimeo.

The Problem

I read an article. I want to see what people are saying about that article on Twitter. I want to see who is talking about it on Twitter. I’d maybe even like to see who has said stuff about this topic before, and who says stuff on it regularly (who are the mavens?). At the moment, I don’t know of an easy way to do this, as most people are slinging around shortened URLs (bit.ly and all that).

The Solution

A website where you input the long-form URL (the whole business with the random string, and the site’s domain, and whatnot). The site then uses the major URL shortening services to shorten the link, scans Twitter for the shortened URL, possibly even parses the text of the page and finds out the title of the article and scans for that as well, and then displays a list of all the people who are talking about it.

Users’ searches would be associated with their account, and they could tag their searches, so they could more easily find them later. Furthermore, the site benefits from “The Del.icio.us Lesson,” and could become an aggregator / recommendation engine on topics. Also, users whose posts end up getting auto-tagged regularly would begin to be seen as domain experts (or, at least, “persons of interest”), and they’d begin to be dynamically listed in their own short list. So, for example, show me a list of people who are chattering about articles about entrepreneurship or biofuel or coffee.

Scanning Docs With Your MacBook's Built-In Camera

Ideas I Don’t Have Time For - 001 - MacBook Scanner from charliepark on Vimeo.

The Problem

I’d rather not have another Thing to manage. I’d rather not have a scanner as a separate peripheral device.

The Solution

Develop a piece of software that lets people hold up a piece of paper, and then it takes a photo of that paper, using the camera that’s built in to the MacBook. Using standard OCR parsing and processing, you could have a scanner built in to your MacBook.

After recording this, I came across Prizmo, which seems like a really close version of this. I tried them out, and the camera in the MacBook might not be good enough for OCR. But, surely, we can’t be too far away from lenses that would be able to handle this flawlessly, right? Prizmo seems to work well with normal digital camera photos, but that’s not really the point of my idea.

Managing Brands Via Twitter

Ideas I Don’t Have Time For - 000 - SignalFire from charliepark on Vimeo.

Working Name:

SignalFire

Audience:

Businesses (all sizes), individuals

Pricing:

$12 per Twitter account, per year (Maybe more. See below.)

Prior Art:

Gmail, various Twitter clients

The Problem

It’s crucial that brand managers, community liaisons, etc., be able to communicate quickly and effectively with their customers, users, and followers. In the past, brands had to actually follow people to get @messages, and there wasn’t a good search mechanism. With the advent of @messages being recognized by Twitter, that’s not totally necessary. But even now, the search mechanism isn’t great. So the best option brand managers have at the moment is to set up an RSS feed for mentions of their username. It’d be useful to have everything all in one place, where you could filter out all of the noise, and only get the relevant signal.

The Solution

A Twitter client aimed at brand managers.

• It only shows you @messages, DMs, and mentions of your username.
• It threads messages, so users who are RT-ing messages you’ve already got in the system are shown, but the original tweets are pulled into the thread and shown (again, but minimized / visually subdued in some way).
• It color-codes (colors you set) the usernames you set up, so, at a glance, you can see which username the tweet is addressing.
• Once you’ve replied (or otherwise marked-as-read), the color fades to a less-saturated version of the color, so you can see which tweets need addressing.
• DMs are auto DM’d back (assuming you’re both following each other).

Things I Forgot To Mention

• If it wasn’t clear in the video, you’d only get tweets that @message you, DM you, or mention your brand. You’d get those from everyone, whether you follow them or not. You wouldn’t get all of the other messages from the people that you follow.
• You could easily set up auto-following, to enable them to DM you in the future.
• Since it’d be storing all of your info in a database, the app would be able to offer some pretty interesting visualizations of your mentions, like a Google Analytics for tweets. This service could be a premium offering.
• Also, with the database, you could quickly see all of that user’s interactions with you, so you can quickly scan the history of familiar names. Watch out for scope creep here!
• I mentioned the pricing at $12 per year, per account. As a side-revenue generator, I think you could add in “tracking” accounts, for, say, $6 per year, where you can follow tweets about a competitor’s Twitter username (just like your normal SignalFire-or-whatever account), but where (obvs.) you don’t have posting rights. That might be free.
• Actually, I think it could command a higher price than $12 / year, but I haven’t thought a ton about this. Maybe the normal price is $5 per account per month, but the first account is discounted to $12 for the year, to get people in the door?