Here, want an internet startup idea? If you use it you have to give me like, uh, something.
Anyways, here's the thing,
gmail is a good email
program thingie.
Orkut is almost a good
social network contacts list (they dont know that they're a contact list, they dont see past the social network deal). Do you see where I'm going? If you merge the two, you have an excellent contact list, friend of friend network and email service. Imagine this: someone send me an email in this new app (let's call it Alex's Awesome Idea or AAI) and then I add them to my
friends contacts list. Whenever they change their cell# or email address, as long as they keep the "orkut" side of AAI up to date, I have their current info.
One of the problems this fixes is that orkut is fun for about a week, then you don’t log in for months. If it was part of your email, you'd be logged in a lot more and (because when you get new email you’d get new contacts) your network might quickly grow large enough to be useful for things. You know what would be a useful thing? How about an
e-vite type service to this that doesn't suck?
What sucks about evite? The fact that when you get invited you have to go to a webpage to see any details, then you have to click through like 4 pages of ads to find out what it is and accept. I don't want to know how much of a pain it is to actually set up an event.
It would be better if it was sent as an appointment (ala outlook appointments) across the email bit - and since your contact list is your social network, picking the people to send it to should be a breeze.
Next, there should be a cell phone program that doesn't suck for synching with this. Instead of using a dock or Bluetooth (neither of which is a promise on any phone) it should use the phone's wireless internet capability or, for something that really works with everything, use the phone's SMS system.
What I imagine sucks about current synching programs is they snych with your outlook on your computer - what if you're not near your computer? What if you have three email accounts? two computers? I'm sure it's all because Microsoft doesn't want to set something up that doesnt require owning Outlook.
Imagine this: I lose my cell phone, it's deactivated, I get a new one, load up the JAVA AAI program and boom my cell is replenished with all my contact data, heck you could do it on the road. Imagine this: you need to use someone else's cell to make a call but you don't know the number of the person you want to call – use the JAVA AAI program to retrieve your phone book, then log out. Of course, from there it's not too hard to imagine adding
dodgeball social network capability.
Once appropriate security measures are taken (for example, I may not want my contacts list (all or some) to be public), the AAI client logins have to be bullet proof, etc. It would rock.
Maybe you could hook in
del.icio.us too.
I want it already, who will deliver it first?
Google (
Orkut)/
Friendster is obviously in good position with their existing FoF networks. Google has the advantage of also having an
awesome email thingie – but I wonder if orkut/gmail are too far apart from each other in the organization for people to realize what the natural step is.
Cell phone networks would also be wise to get wired into this: storing remote address books would be really handy for customers and could be used to lock customers into their service.
Dodgeball seems to be in a good middle position, they have patents that would be very applicable but perhaps not the resources?
Microsoft Outlook should do all this shit by now but its not free and it's not a web application like it should be.
Evite shouldnt try to do anything because I think their service is obnoxious.
If someone makes this, they should call it
"the all purpose everything"
