I have got The Ultimate Idea - help me

tbr

Hi. I have an idea. Wait, it's not only an idea, it's The Idea. Please listen. I first got the idea this summer, and I have spent a lot of time refining it since.

It's a completely new thing. A web thing of course, a 2.0-ish one I guess. If done well and right, this could be It. The web app concept everyone's been waiting for but no one has dared to imagine. We're speaking the order of magnitude of blogging, forums, wikis, chat, hell even freaking e-mail. I know you wont believe me, but I'm telling you, this is just such a great concept and it is currently missing from the web. As you might guess from my examples, it's related to online communication and publishing, and I know there are people here passionate about these things. It's sort of all of the things I just mentioned at the same time, yet taken to a completely new level. As you might understand, I can't spell it all out detailed just like that, because I truly believe this is a really really great idea, and I don't just want to lose it. The concept is simple, yet nothing like it exists to my knowledge.

Please help me. What should I do? I think I need to find someone who is willing to listen closely to my idea, take it seriously and if they believe in it (they will!), to help me develop it into a full web app. Does anyone know who I should contact?

(I mean, we could be rich and famous! Perhaps even get laid! Oh wai... this is the internet. Well rich and famous anyway!)


Thank you,
tbr

Wanderer

Seek out someone at Google, for advice at least, I hear they are very receptive when it comes to innovation, they have even been known to "employ" people while they develop a promising idea.

Posted: Saturday, 3 November 2007 at 7:58AM

tbr

That's interesting. Browsing their labs pages makes me feel like my idea would be a bit out of place - it's more of a social nature than a "tool" like most of their lab status apps seem to be. I surely will contact them however! Hard to know where to send the email to get it through to the right people though...

Krak

http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/index.html ??? Good luck, finding the right people to talk to can sometimes be harder than getting the idea actually off and running. Perhaps google for google (lol) emails or something?

jimw

I have several good developer friends who could listen and direct you.

tbr

Actually, I guess I can give you some more details on the concept. The idea started out as a way of combining the pros of web forums and wikis while getting rid of some of the cons of both, but it turned out that the concept I came up with could be extended to do SO much more. You could sort of call it a swiss army knife of online discussion. I found that the differences between the services mentioned above actually are so small that there really is no reason to keep them all separated. Instead of having the exact feature set set in stone, I want to let the users adapt the service to fit whatever each situation requires. This results in great flexibility and a way to transcend traditional "genres" of text based communication, and perhaps more interestingly, even create completely new forms. I know it might sound like this would be very complicated to use, but the way I do it, I've actually managed to break it down into surprisingly few and easy-to-understand elements.

Of course I have very detailed ideas for exactly HOW this all should work and how to present it to the user, plus many things which I haven't even really touched upon here.

Krak: Thank you, yes that's where I went too. I hope they will get back to me.

jimw: If you think you know someone who might be interested, I would love to get contact with them.

Max_B

I'd love to work on this kind of stuff…
But, you know, we must earn our living and the hard part of such project is to find the means to step out the first usable stage.

tbr

Max_B: Well, I've never been first hand involved in any "big" project like this before, so I don't really have a clue how much time it would take to make something nice and useable, though I have done some simple small scale web development on my own, meaning I am not a complete noob in any way. I know what technologies exist and are needed, etc.

I have a good idea of what parts are needed to get the whole thing rolling at all, then the more delicate aspects could be added as things progress. As I just said I've never been part of a web app development team but I have seen some coders with skill writing completely functional (though simple) games from scratch in a matter of hours -- if this is anything like that, it shouldn't be that hard to create a rough prototype as a proof of concept in a few days or so.

I should add that I have emailed some people who I think have the right experience to make this project become something pretty, though it's weekend so they probably wont get back to me in a few days, if they do at all of course.

And right now I feel that I need to clean up all my notes and finish writing the first draft of the "design document", so I actually have a solid and succinct way to show what the idea is all about, when/if I find someone to work with...

tbr

I'll be rude enough to bump this – does anyone have a forum or similar to suggest for finding people to team up with?

jimw

Here's a crazy thought - why not ask Mr. Lussumo himself.

NickE

I regrettably don't have loads of time to devot to projects at the moment, but if you wanted some help or advice I'd be happy to see if I could do anything ( I promise I'd keep my mouth shut :-P )

crash_D.

tbr, you should understand that a good idea (even well explained and formulated) is not at all enough to have success on the web... i don't mean to boast, but after about 4 starts with new cool projects, i found that each fo them requires so much devotion and time taht i finally shut all except one and now devote all my time to it... it will be a headache when it comes to implementation, regardless of how fun it may be in the idea phase (and im sure it was fun and joyfully challenging!!) ..

for grand scale apps, you will need 100s of 1000s of $... if you don't need this much money (or at least 30k), then you either need an equivalent (like here at lussumo: all work and time spent to develop vanilla equals how much in $? :-) or this is not a big project...

I suggest that before talking to anybody about taking part in this, make sure you have a 30+ pages business plan with all phases of the business, incomes forecasts, finances, personnel, traffic, income sources, expenses, etc... and then with this business plan you should have a detailed description of your market (although you mentioned it a little in the business plan) with segment leaders "parsed" and analyzed till the last very broken link... and then the third doc would be the specification of the application, also about 50-100 pages... when you have these three documents, you will have a great and vivid understanding of where you need to go, what you need for it, what people, how much money, etc... this documentary development adn reseach would take about 2-6 months, but its worth it... then you could simply go to the bank or a millionaire friend and ask the required sum for your peoject.

good luck

tbr

jimw: Sure! Maaaaaaaark?

SirNot: Thanks, I'll definitely keep it in mind.

crash_D: Thank you so much for this insightful and detailed reply. I'm not sure if we're on the same level here however; I guess "big" is a word with a very relative value. As you no doubt have understood, web development is not my profession and also not what I study at this point*, it's merely a hobby/interest/passion. This of course doesn't stop me from having a great idea. I just can't see the harm in shopping around for interest in the idea, before I start thinking about the whole thing from strictly a business perspective. I hope you understand that the "we could be rich and famous" part was a joke. I'm not that serious about this, or rather, I am very serious but also very open for anything. Either it could just be a fun project and I'll see where it leads, or as more serious business if find anyone who has the right experience to help me with that part. I'm not going to start off with a big loan pumping hundreds of thousands into this project all on my own, that would just be stupid for someone with my relatively low experience level.

* I am planning to study usability, user interface design or some nearby field in the future however, once I've finished my current education.

NickE

I think you're going pretty far overboard there crash...

Minisweeper

I dont. It depends entirely on what the project is though.