What if X-Plane, the FAA approved flight simulator available on Linux, Mac and PC, had built in support for the fantastic online service LiveATC.net [it streams live feeds from air traffic control towers from around the world].

Currently the simulator has random and continuous radio chatter to add to realism of in-cockpit sounds. And for real ATC communication it uses rather plastic voice synthesis.

If users could plug in the feed from the real airport they were flying to in the simulator and be able to control it from within the actual application, they would get a much better sense of realism – especially if the simulator was set to download real weather data from the Web as well.

Hashtags have proven to be extremely useful in twitter. It has the ability to convert noise to signal in the cacophony of the millions of 140 character packets that fly around the planet everyday.

What if we can spread the same meme and apply hashtags to that other noisy medium: email. If we were disciplined to add hashtags to subject headers, we could make it very easy for recipients to organise and respond to our missives. Perhaps email clients of the future could have built-in capabilities for dealing with hashtags?

Emails with subject headers like “re: hi” are terribly obtuse and confusing. Imagine a world in which your inbox consists of the likes of:

• #approve #project_x #budget
• #party #alex – you are invited
• #fyi #design

etc.

What if there was a Web service similar to plusplusbot.com that could collate car registration numbers in the context of good or bad driving. If you spotted a bad driver you can tweet their registration number with x hashtag (possibly including location) and a positive or negative modifier that would then classify that number.

If critical mass is achieved you could have a very useful resource that could help law enforcement in finding bad drivers and encourage good drivers through promotions.

Potentially insurance companies can use this as well to find out if potential clients are good or bad bets.

What if an online application existed that simply helped people recommend movies, books, services to others. The interface and premise should be really simple: In really big type, two boxes and a submit button:

If you like [.......] you will like [........] [submit]

The database will create the connections and all sorts of interesting visualisations of these pairs would become possible. More importantly, the adjacent connections would also be interesting. In reality, strings of concepts could become connected and help people find content, Web sites, brands – anything really – based on what they like and what the swarm likes.

Micro-blogging service twitter provides a great platform for chess players to play one another. Simple notation can be tweeted using the @username format.

But what if an Internet application was developed that could read these tweets and visualize (and auhenticate gameplay)? Furthermore, if the user makes a move, the system could send the tweet to the other user’s account making for a seamless gaming experience.

As the games take place in an open, public format, it would get interesting if a group of users could play another group or a grandmaster through a tweet and vote system.

More and more twitter users are starting to use the hashtag #brandplus or #brandminus to report brand experiences.

There is an opportunity to build a live tracker using the twitter API.

Imagine that the system would take each brandplus and brandminus tweet and then plot them on a map. The more plusses a brand gets the bigger and greener it gets on the map. The more minuses it gets, the bigger and redder it grows based on the net score.

Clearly it would help if users were encouraged to follow some sort of syntax:

#[brandplus or minus] [brandname] [location] [reason]

Potentially a map could be a useful way of representing the data but there might be other ways as well. Users might be given the opportunity to toggle various viewing modes.

There is room for a twitter client that can provide a complete user interface experience that resembles something like Facebook. One suspects that such a client, in combination with already established twitter services like twitpic, would be able to provide a rich one stop solution, where tweets could be represented beautifully, in a rich graphical mode, where re-tweeting, DM’ing etc. have clear buttons.

Of course, the original twitter would still work, but for those users more used to thinking in terms of Facebook, this would really help them understand the power of twitter and thus help twitter expand its userbase.

Here is another idea on how to make Evernote better. What if you could flip a switch on your some of your notes to make them part of an open, searchable archive. Some things you’d like to remember would definitaly be private, but some would be great if they were accessible by everyone.

Recipes, lists of telephone numbers of taxi services – the list is long. If Evernote aims to become humanity’s memory, this would be a great step forward in developing a collective memory.

There is an opportunity to build a Wikipedia style sound effect library.

Members should be able to upload clips from anywhere in the world, tag them and then release them for private or commercial use to other members.

This would ensure that a comprehensive library can be built cheaply, with specific sound effects from the most far flung reaches of the world. The sound of a Hong Tram’s horn. A police siren in Bangladesh.

You get the picture.

This tweet by Valdis Krebs gave me a thought. Indeed twitter’s self-organising power does give it the potential to supercede many structured Web services.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for a very, very powerful link aggregator to be built using the twitter API. All it needs to do, is scan the public tweets for links, extrapolate them if they have been shortened and index them in a sexy interface. The most tweeted ones would rise to the top. Then, give the community the ability to tag them and you can build a link aggregator that can indeed become more powerful than the likes of delicious, in a matter of weeks.