Regularly, professional athletes are outed for using performance enhancing drugs. It happens with such regularity, that one can assume that there are two sets of moral views on the roles of these drugs in sports.
So what if sports that are constantly hit by these scandals launch parallel ‘roid leagues. Keep the drug-free version for those who believe sport should be about the testing of human capabilities and have the drug-enhanced version for those who want to see how far drugs can take human performance. Such leagues can attract the sponsorship and participation of drug companies.
These leagues can co-exist like how for many sports, amateur and professional codes co-exist.
If participants in drug-free codes are caught, they are immediately transferred to the drug-enhanced league.
What if you printed spreadsheets on white bed linen like sheets, duvet covers and pillow cases?
It will be any accountant geek’s dream.
What if, for the next Bond film (or anything new in the sexy spy genre), the hero had to deal with a villain with world-dominating aspirations by building up a Web 2.0 network and then subverting the information people put in there for evil. Like Evernote, Facebook … even … Google.
Would be really interesting to see if that changes people’s level of trust in social media.
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.
In a just society, the rule of law must reign supreme.
But sometimes individuals commit such unspeakable acts that inspire immense anger in society. Serial killers, rapists – and even those that are mentally disturbed and commit horrific and senseless acts against children.
Perhaps there is an opportunity to create a gaming platform where society is allowed to vent their anger and frustration on these individuals without actually harming these individuals. Making them the virtual targets in a point-and-shoot game for example.
This might be an extreme measure, but potentially will help society deal with the incredible injustices that are sometimes caused by individuals.
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.
iPhone and iPod touch can control iTunes libraries via a wireless network. Turns out that is a very useful tool.
What if these devices could also control a user’s Mac over a local area network or even a wide area network? It would be great to at least have access to a documents folder or at least sharing a screen.
===UPDATE 01/24===
Just noticed that the Apple app store contains a new application for iPhone/iPod touch that allows the mobile device to connect to the new Keynote ’09 to control it over a wireless network. Useful, as the slides appear on the screen, is flicked with your thumb over the touch screen and your presentation notes appear nice and legible alongside the slides.
There is no doubt that the iPhone/iPod touch pairing with the Mac is going to yield plenty of possibilities.
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.
