You know what I'm like, brain always ticking over and getting sidetracked onto tangents... A couple of times in the last week or so I've seen people moan about something on twitter and thought "You know what, I could make something out of that"

First off was an idea for some kind of twitter enabled nutrition and weight-loss service inspired by Jon The Beef - something along the lines of "you tell it what you had for lunch and it works out your calorie intake". The idea seemed pretty smart and so in an idle half-hour I got busy working out how it would work... And then of course while trying to find a suitable source for nutritional data (specifically for a cup of coffee) found Gyminee a website that does just that, along with tracking physical activity. There is also this really cool looking weight tracking twitter app spotted over at FlowingData.

Then yesterday morning it happened again: I saw a tweet from Paul Capewell moaning about how rubbish freecycle and it's various factions are, all down to them being stuck in the web-stone-age of operating through Yahoo Groups. Not only is it hard to keep track of what is going on but the nature of email lists can lend itself to ructions and politics and splits and off-topic discussions unhelpful to the core mission of recycling unwanted items. Using a platform like yahoo also creates risks regarding leakage of personal information as users can't be relied on not to paste their phone numbers or addresses into messages to the whole list. The moderation of the lists is also a real issue as it falls on a central person or two for each region, who may or may not have the time to deal with either moderation or simple administrative requests - for example I tried to join Freecycle Manchester (having previously been on the Sheffield and Lancaster lists) several months ago and nobody responded...

There must be a better way to do this and so I cranked out a mockup on Omnigraffle and started tweeting about it:

It was going to be a service called whowants? and it was going to be awesome - I even got Stef Lewandowski interested however following the principles of Stef's 5 Counter Intuitive Rules for Creative People it of course ended in rule #2 - Fail more. This morning on twitter I noticed I was being followed by Freebootr which surprise surprise is more-or-less nearly exactly what I had envisioned.

Never mind - there is a lesson to be learned from this that it's all the more important to keep having creative ideas and giving them away and pushing them out there even if they are major failures or have simply already been done. Apart from anything else it keeps your Whuffie up, something I need in spades right now!