Idea 48: Keyword Group Chat - Real Time Twitter / Quora

Ever had a question about something, could not find it online, then post it in a forum, or Twitter/Quora, and painfully waiting for someone to reply? What if you can have instant communication with a person holding the right piece of information, whenever you wanted it?

The idea is to provide an infinite amount of real-time chat rooms organized by key words.

Type something on your mind, "laptop", "heroku", "health insurance", "games", "Chinese food", the related sentences or key words that other people are typing in real-time will start to show up. Along with the sentences are chat-rooms associated with the sentences. You may choose to join one of them, or create your own, while letting all the people who are interested in similar topics know.

It is not the chat room in traditional sense, where you look into a category and see what are the rooms in there. Here, you type something and find related things that are happening in ALL chat-rooms in real time. On the technology side, this may require some complex real-time reindexing, however, demand is the mother of invention, right?

As the user base grows, businesses can establish real-time customer service reps answering questions, and because the common information is shared among all interested participants, the rep redundancy can be kept at a minimum.

Please let me know if you are interested in implementing such an app.

Idea 47: Voice Enabled Auto Tweet

I like one thing about human nature that is bringing a lot of motivation for technology innovations -- laziness! Yes, we are lazy, and we invent things to justify being lazy, which is good.

Today's idea is for all those lazy Twitter-holics. You don't have to type anything on the keyboard in order to Tweet your status. Just speak to the application on iPhone, or other mobile devices; the voice recognition software will translate the sentences to text, making sure it's within the 140 character limit, then transmit to Twitter server.

What would make it more interesting is, if it can understand emotions, and transcribe that into Tweets as well. Make a laugh, now you have "HAHAHA", or ":D" in your Tweets. That would be fun.

Or, how about automatically discover URL links? Whenever you say "Guy Kawasaki blog", it finds the URL and brings that link into your Tweet.

Lazy is good; lazy motivates innovation.

image credit Louise Lazell

Idea 42: Relationship Analyzer - How Close Are You And Your Friends

How many friends do you have? Do you talk to them, or rather Twit? You may not realize, that the person you talk the most, share the most, connect the most may not be the one who you think is.

Have an algorithm to analyze your daily communication streams, Tweets, SMS, phone calls, emails, and then calculates, for each of your contacts, their degree of closeness from you.

Why is this useful? For a number of reasons, at least.

To set your priorities. What you want to achieve versus what you are actually doing. Have you called your mother lately? Call your mother right away.

To know yourself better. What is your biggest dream and untapped potential? If you're still unclear, the daily rumbling of yours might give some hint.

To discover friendship, and well other relationships. Who do you reweet the most? Who do you share the most tweet words, tweet links? If you chose to share the meta-data extracted from your streams, that may help the matching algorithm to suggest you some interesting fellows. (like an earlier idea here)

There might as well be other reasons that this can be useful. If you have one, do let me know.

photo credit loungerie

Idea 41: Object Tweet : Pulse Of The Real World

Make the world more efficient by giving any object the ability to Twit! Why, because we need the information, now!

A semiconductor chip: getting too hot when it's time to turn off your laptop and cool down a bit.

A computer: when a virus invaded, or a web visitor did something suspicious.

A house: the roof is leaking, get it fixed, dude; or, it's time to clean your drainage, kill the ants, change the air filter, mow the lawn, ..., whew.

A car: time to get the oil filter exchanged, and by the way, don't forget to rotate the tires also.

A train: bad news, but the next #1 train is delayed for at least half an hour. That would be a money saving tweet, since your time is billed.

A store: coupons, discount codes, new product releases, tweets, tweets, tweets.

and more ....

If only these can all be automated through Twitter, we will be less worrying and live longer. :)

photo credit foxypar4

Idea 40: You Daily Dose Of Bible Verse, Based On Your Twitter Updates

The Bible is rich of spiritual wisdom that can help you get through the most challenging part of life. Popular iGoogle app delivers a random verse to your desktop daily, but how do you know which verse is just the right one for your day?

Here's an idea. At the end of each day, your Twitter updates are collected, analyzed, and based on the keywords in your tweets, the most relevant Bible verses are extracted and presented to you.

In fact, not just your Twitter updates, your emails, places you visit, people you talked with, anything related to your day, as long as you can record it, can be used for analysis in the calculation. Another way to produce information from our lives. (see earlier idea about personal metrics)

As the Bible says:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. - Matthew 7:7

photo credit Andy

Idea #29 Real Time Social Shopping With Twitter Automation

Social shopping harnesses the power of social networks to make better purchase decisions by leveraging the experience of other users, in real time, not just Amazon ratings, but live interactions with peer buyers.

Yes, the scam products that don't live up to their marketing hype don't deserve a place on earth.

Some smart folks started this, like TribeSmart and ReallyWantThat, but don't quite have the "real time" feel yet.

Here's an idea.

Create a unique hash tag for each product out there. Example, Crocs Cayman Sandal, ASIN B0014BYKI2.

Everyone uses this tag when twitting their experiences, opinions, and critics. Example, "#B0014BYKI2 love the sandal, comfortable, convertible, rating 5".

It is then super easy to check the twitter stream for user comments on this product. Check the tag stream; ask a question with the tag before you buy!

Even further, the aggregated user comments and ratings are automatically scaned and stored on the server. When you twit the product hash tag with a question, you instantly receive a direct message with a link to the detailed rating report (and the best price).

Go social. Go real time.

Update: Impressed by the business model of Groupon, social shopping offer deep discount through the power of group buying, and it's fun.

Idea #26 Twitter Automated Polling By @Replies

A phenomenal amount of online activities and user opinions are being expressed in Twitter.

4 startups that facilitate polling opinions on the Twitterspere, plus Twtpoll. Well, not quite satisfying. Users have to be redirected to a separate website.

How nice would it be if I can directly "tweet" my answers and it gets automatically captured ? Here's an idea to do that.

Ask your question by a reply to @_poll_ with hash tag describing the name of the poll, and "Q" indicating this is a question. Example: "@_poll_ #abortion Q: should be legalized yes or no ?"

Answer your question by a reply to @_poll_ with hash tag as poll name, and "yes" or "no" indicating your answer, with a possibly briefly extended description. Example: "@_poll_ #abortion Yes support legalized abortion".

The answers will be automatically captured by software through Twitter API and populated to database for analysis. Quite simple, eh ?

Let me know if this would be useful.

photo credit Neil Wykes

Idea #22 Personalized Recommendations Through Twitter Stream

If you use Twitter a lot, the words steadily coming out from your Tweets, aka, your Twitter stream, contains a lot of information about you. It tells about your interests, location, food you eat, events you go to, opinions you have, and more. These are extremely valuable data to make highly personalized recommendations if well analysed. Most importantly, they are free and publicly accessible.

In fact companies have started mining these data streams in hope of providing highly differentiated services. For instance, moonit.com uses your Twitter behaviors, Tweets, followers and followees, to suggest who you should date. Your Tweets already tells who you are, why should you fill out a lengthy phycological survey ?

I would like an algorithm to recommend me the following based on my Tweets :

• Events happening around me that are interesting to me (LikeMe.net ? No, still based on survey questionnaires)
  
• People with like minds who I should meet and partner with
  
• Restaurants and Cafes with just my tastes (yelp.com ? not quite.)
  
• Cool gadgets that I should check out
• News and websites that I will like (Stumbleupon.com? well maybe.)
  
• and much more
  

These are just some simple examples. The opportunity is endless, as long as a data mining algorithm can be built to discover the associations between keywords, and cluster keywords into categories, as talked about earlier, the power of association.

BTW, you should try out the extreamly cool way to visualize your Twitter stream, Portwiture.com, which expresses your Tweets with Flickr photos.

photo credit Konstantin Sutyagin.