My New Site

For anyone wondering why I’ve been such a slacker lately, it’s ’cause I’ve been working on this: www.innovateon.com  🙂

Now that we’re past launch and things are slowing down a bit, hopefully I’ll be able to start posting some new ideas again.  Anyway, check out the site and let me know what you think.

7 Simple MySpace App Ideas

As you may have heard, MySpace has launched their developer platform a little while back. Surprisingly, I’ve seen little-to-no buzz about this, which is great news for all the independent social app developers out there.  Why?

• In spite of their tremendous growth, MySpace is still over four times as large as Facebook.
• Many successful Facebook developers cited “Launching within the first week of the platform” as one of the reasons their apps took off.
• As confirmed in the comments of my last post (thanks, Ben!), MySpace will not be supporting a version of the Facebook APIs, which lessens the chance that every successful Facebook app will instantly be ported over to MySpace right off the bat.
• MySpace needs to win the hearts and minds of the social app developer community, and differentiate themselves from F8.  One way to do that?  Through a robust developer revenue share program. 
• MySpace is a different audience than Facebook, which means that an app that is successful on Facebook won’t necessarily take hold on MySpace, and vice versa. That opens the door wide open for a whole new class of apps to take hold.

Seriously, this could be pretty huge.  And the best part is that the barrier to entry is so freakin’ low, you don’t need to borrow money or quit your job to become a full-time entrepreneur to build out the next killer app.  Just a little time, some basic coding knowledge, and an idea.  Ask your wife for the first, hit up MySpace for the second, and I’ll take a shot at helping you out with the third.  Just a quick aside, some of these ideas are likely already on Facebook – probably best to do a little due diligence to make sure you’re not going to rip off anyone too badly…

1. Celebrity Soulmate

Take a simple 10-question quiz to find out who your Celebrity Soulmate is.  Display your celebrity match on your profile and invite your friends to discover who their celebrity soulmate is.  Bonus: send your enemies a fake celebrity soulmate invitation – no matter how they answer, they always end up with the dude from the Dell commercials.

2. I Never

I’ve you’ve never heard of the game “I Never”, take a drink and visit this link.  This would be pretty basic to implement – you ask a question to all of your friends, and only by answering the question yourself would you get to see how the rest of your friends answered.  You could also include profile photos of other random people who have answered the same as you have.  Along with the basic “I have” or “I have never” binary choices, each question could have comments to allow you to weasel out of any seemingly exotic situation (“You know, because it’s YOUR dog, get it?“)

3. Troops

Here’s the pitch: To show support for our troops in Iraq, let’s try to get every single MySpace profile to feature a “Support Our Troops” icon (flag, yellow ribbon, eagle with a machine gun in it’s talons, etc..).  Once you install the icon on your profile page, you’d get a little graph on the canvas page showing how many of your friends are also supporting the troops (and, of course, an easy way to send them in invite to boost your percentage).  Imagine the pride that a soldier who logged onto MySpace would feel upon seeing the nation’s consolidated support spread across the entire MySpace community.

 4. Fake Scrabulous

Create a Scrabbulous clone with a twist – when you send out an invite to a friend, they always seem to get the “bad luck” of having the following letters: Q X W V W Z V.  Of course, it will be doubly frustrating when you are constantly scoring 7-letter “bingos“, which is insanely easy given that you can choose any letters you want. 

 5. Most Likely To

Which of your friends is most likely to become president?  Most likely to eat a dozen tacos in less than 30 minutes?  Most likely to marry a taxidermist?  Fill out a ten-question quiz by choosing an candidate from within your friends list.  Of course, each friend that you picked would get a little notice: “Your friend Hillary thought you were most likely to…(click here to install this app to find out)”

  6. Mexico

For Mexican-Americans (or any ethnicity), a way to display cultural heritage and network with other MySpacers who also have similar backgrounds.  Load up the app, stick a pin in a map to indicate your birthplace, and get a list of all of the other MySpacers from the same area, listed in order of current geological closeness.

7. Religion

Share your faith and find others who share your same ideals and background.  Choose a religious image or inspirational passage to display on your profile.  Choose your favorite religious music, movies, or books and get matched up with others who share your same tastes.  Single?  Browse other eligible bachelor/bachelorettes in your town, and if you find a potential soulmate, send them a electronic token of your admiration (only $5 for a dozen roses!).

I’ve got a few spare cycles this weekend and might take a crack at getting one of these ideas off the ground – any advice for which one I should choose?  I’ve got one in mind, but I’d definitely like to hear what you think before I get started tomorrow afternoon.  The ideal app for me is simple to build, highly viral, and very easy to maintain over time.  Revenue potential?  At this point it’s a nice to have – the idea here is really more to try this thing out, learn something new, and have a little fun.

I’m Boring – Check Out BitLesson

Sorry for being so quiet lately – I’m about a week away from relaunching our site here at work, which means crazy long hours of bug bashing and copy editing.  If anyone ever wants to know about the proper way to refer to specific Microsoft products, just give me a call.  Complicated stuff.

 Anyway, I have a list of 10 MySpace apps that is about halfway finished and should be posted shortly, but in the meantime, I wanted to let you all know about a new site that was launched by my sometimes-co-contributor Colin called BitLesson.  The concept is based on one of my favorite ideas from the past few months – More Smarter.  It’s off to a great start, definitely stop by and let Colin know what you think.