Re:What idea(s) do you regret not implementing?
by nostrademons on Monday July 30, 2007 @02:34PM
(#37726)
A lot of people had the idea behind Meebo. A friend and I were doing AIM bots back in 2000. Essentially we'd implemented SmarterChild before it became popular. Then when AJAX was all the rage in late 2004 and 2005, I said "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could put live chat up on a web page and update the display through AJAX?"
I was actually thinking in terms of the social-networking angle - you ever notice how many conversations on LiveJournal comments or FaceBook walls start out as asynchronous messages and then become conversations when both/all parties get online? There's room to make that interaction a lot more frictionless, and I have actually seen anyone go through with it. Maybe I'll be saying "Damn, I regret not implementing that idea" in another 2 years.
Anyway, it's not who thinks up the idea that matters, it's who actually goes and does it. Most successful ideas are pretty obvious, they're just overlooked because people think "If it were that easy, somebody would've done it already".
I was actually thinking in terms of the social-networking angle - you ever notice how many conversations on LiveJournal comments or FaceBook walls start out as asynchronous messages and then become conversations when both/all parties get online? There's room to make that interaction a lot more frictionless, and I have actually seen anyone go through with it. Maybe I'll be saying "Damn, I regret not implementing that idea" in another 2 years.
Anyway, it's not who thinks up the idea that matters, it's who actually goes and does it. Most successful ideas are pretty obvious, they're just overlooked because people think "If it were that easy, somebody would've done it already".