Is there such a beast? Google seems to hear people talking about trying to find one, but I don’t see any to play with.

Perhaps something like subwiki could be made to just make local edits to checked out files, and commit occassionally? This would allow N instances of subwiki on the same content, but located on different machines (my laptop, for instance). You could utilize svn’s merge ability to make it all work together.

Just a random thought.

Maybe this is a project for someone…

Popularity: 44%

David Hornik has a great post on the power of blogging:

That is the power of blogging and it is why I spend as many hours as I do wandering around the blog “library.” Moreover, it is precisely why so many smart people are focused upon the hard question of how to abstract that temporal proximity from the blogs themselves. I am convinced startups will solve this problem, not the Googles and Yahoos of this world, and look forward to seeing (and perhaps funding) the different approaches that emerge.

“Temporal proximity” is the technical term for “Tom likes what Steve likes”. This hidden power of hyperlinking is set to explode in the coming months and years, as many people are hard at work on this “problem”.

This is also part of the reason that I believe many ’subscriptions’ in the future will be based on aggregations of items in temporal proximity to one another. My 1500 subscriptions give me a lot of great information, but with over 15 million feeds out there, I am outnumbered by 3orders of magnitude.

I could conceive of the ability of aggregators to make up one order of magnitude in the near future, possibly 2 within a few years, but by that time, we will still be behind 3 orders, as the blogosphere continues to grow. The only way to make that up is to help the user find what they want using some sort of temporal proximity technique, be that cross-linking, keyword search, folksonomy, you-name-it.

It is going to take some serious outside the box thinking to satisfy this informavore (sounds a lot like information whore).

Popularity: 29%

WIth all the rumors about Google starting an online payment service, I wanted to share my simple idea of a payment service that would become ubiquitous on the web. While I fully expect something from Google to be simpler to use than Paypal, and scale much larger, I would love to see Google take on micropayments.

The basic idea is to support micropayments between millions/billions of buyers and sellers. To acheive this, payment processing would need to be revolutionized:

Simple identity

Using something simple like sxip or similar, so that login and other high costs parts of the transaction go away from a user interaction perspective.

Front $1 to every user of the system

Or, alternately, have the user put the money into their accounts in larger chunks ($10-$20 or more). This will be the first key to a massive micropayment system, acting as a clearinghouse until the bill amount reaches an amount that the transaction can be passed to normal payment processors (PayPal, Visa, banks, etc). If a company like Google fronted $1 to each user of the system, that amounts to a maximum of $6 billion global maximum, they should be able to cover that.

Reduce the cost of a transaction

Confirm and process the requests in realtime, with no transaction log. A transaction log of billions per day would be a cost to great to bear for the system to work. Figure out what the system cost of one transaction (debit to one user, credit to another) is, set some cost per transaction, and let the system run. Invidiual vendors would be able to charge whatever they wanted, and could batch up transactions until they meet some minimum that represents profit to them.

Fraud prevention

Since you are not logging transactions, some sort of fraud tracking/prevention program will have to come into place. Google could use their IP in ‘click fraud’ here as well, or you could push some of the liability to the vendor of the transaction, and allow them to choose to log the transaction or merely refund any fraud requests.

If Google actually does something like this, I believe it will be the biggest impact to the current web that they have acheived to date.

Update: Charlene has some comments in the same vein, as well as David.

Popularity: 23%

This idea is simple and straightforward. What if there were a protocol-compatible Microsoft Windows version of SubEthaEdit? This is a perfect chance to start a small software shop in the ‘Decade of the MicroISV’.

For those not familiar, SubEthaEdit allows any number of Mac OS X users to collaboratively edit files from anywhere in the world. Someone ‘hosts’ an editing session, and others login to that session. Everyone has their own cursor to run around the file and make changes in real-time, that everyone can see. It may sound geeky, but when you are trying to debug some config file, or working on a project together, this is invaluable. I have used it on countless occasions, along with iChat AV, to work on something with someone in another state. It is almost like being there!

Alas, SubEthaEdit is Mac only, although the Rendezvous protocol that they use is cross-platform. This leaves out a large portion of the population of computer users. Now, you could go make a clone of SubEthaEdit that did the same thing without interop, but I think the power is in the integration of the two, allowing all platforms to communicate with each other. You could even write one for Gnome/KDE if you wanted to.

I have contacted the codingmonkeys team, let’s see what they have to say about it.

SubEthaEdit allows location-independent collaboration, a Windows/Linux version would add cross-platform to the mix, a win-win-win for everyone (new business, SubEthaEdit crew, and all users).

Popularity: 29%

When I am sitting with any of my friends, we tend to come up with umpteen brilliant business ideas, if we only had time….

I created the ‘business ideas’ category here so that I can share these ideas with the world. These ideas are, in my opinion, valid and profitable, if only I had the time and money to pursue them all. I will post new business ideas here from time to time, and if it goes well, I might just spin this little idea off into a community blog, where everyone can share the ideas that they don’t have time to pursue, but still believe to be worthwhile.

Popularity: 18%