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!
Can I have your bag of flour please? I notice that you deliver. It would be nice to see you.
LOL! Sadly it's not real otherwise I would certainly be keeping it! Would be good to see you too Rob! x
Probably worth posting to GeekUp/NWrug about this, as I believe someone else started a project to automate freecycle... without alienating their existing considerable user base.
Hey Sam!
Having an idea and finding out it's already out there in some form isn't failure. I would consider giving up on ideas all together or not being able to move on from an idea, to be paths to failure. Entrepreneurs and VCs often say that if you think your idea is unique you're wrong. Undoubtedly, there is someone implementing (or considering) something similar. There are several other sites out there besides Freebootr attempting to tackle the same problems we are. Some we didn't even know about until after we launched last year.
All of that doesn't change the fact that we have a passion for developing something that can help improve the environment while saving people money. Freecycle's a great idea, but poorly executed. We think we can do better, and so did you :)
If you're really passionate about an idea, go for it! Let us know how we can help.
No - I do appreciate it's not real failure, it's actually very satisfying to come up with ideas and work them up as far as possible and I'm not going to stop!
To be honest freebootr is so similar to my idea (bar a few niceties like pictures of the items) and done in much the same spirit that actually the very fact that you (Curtis) have looked at my mockup and that it might feed your thinking is an absolutely marvellous outcome. I suppose the other big difference is that I've gone for a less piratical theme ;-)
Now the big thing that freebootr doesn't do that I'd want is an API (and/or RSS feeds) which I gather might be in the works anyway. It would be particularly cool to do a freebootr widget (for mac dashboard or vista or iphone or whatever) giving you a quick at-a-glance list of available stuff.
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Live and learn! Still, it's always good to bounce ideas off one another to come up with better ones (or discover that it's already been done...!). Freebootr looks rather tasty. There's seems to be a real slant towards old tech gear. Worth keeping an eye on...