If you ever needed proof that ideas are best shared rather than protected, watch this video. In it, a caller on Jason Calacanis’ excellent online video show – This Week in Startups  (aka TWIST) – pitches an idea for what would essentially be an administrative tool for schools to communicate with parents as well as a social network of sorts for secure inter-school socialising between children.

I immediately liked the administration aspect of the idea, as I could see the value in providing a calendar and alerts system for busy parents, notifying them of activities they need to attend and such like. In fact, it was an idea I had dreamed up before myself.

Jason however homed in on the social network aspect, or more specifically the mention of an inter-school exchange system. In my opinion, he totally transformed the original idea though from sort of okay to great. His idea? Well, watch the video to find out.

I cannot recommend TWIST highly enough by the way. If you are building or want to build a web start-up, it is a must watch / listen for you. Oh as for Jason who definitely has his critics, I think he demonstrates in this video (and on the show in general) just why he is as successful as he is.

It pains me to give this idea away (if there is such a thing) but no doubt people up and down the tech world are right now brainstorming copy cat or spin-off ideas to ChatRoulette and someone’s bound to have thought of this already and is probably working on it as I write.

I suppose I should first explain what ChatRoulette is – in case you are one of surely only a handful of people who haven’t heard of it in the last week or so. Basically, ChatRoulette is a Stumble Upon for live video chat. You click Play and see live streaming video from some other random user currently on the service. If you like what you see you can stay and chat – otherwise you click Next and up comes another. I think it is brilliantly innovative in its simplicity and randomness. Needless to say some of the ‘content’ on the live feeds are, er, a bit unsavoury shall we say but that only adds to the buzz around the app. And then there is the backstory that it was built by a 17 year old Russian kid just for fun.

Anyway, enough about ChatRoulette – let’s talk about my new idea which was of course inspired by ChatRoulette. The idea is to stream just audio instead of video and have people play music on their computers to their visitors. As a user, you would specify the music genres you like and will be paired people playing similar music. You would of course also have the ability to chat with users when you encounter them – assuming they stick around long enough. You might ask what track it is that is playing for example, or just ask them to marry you – whatever you wish.

The revenue model of this would obviously be around music sales and advertising. Since you would know what music genres each user is interested in, you could target ads on that basis.

The key challenge would of course be distribution as usual. How do you get the word out about this and have it spread – since unlike ChatRoulette, it doesn’t have quite the potential for notoriety to give it the same kind of legs. Still if you were to launch soon, you could piggy-back on the ChatRoulette buzz before it peaks.

How’s this for a fun (if extremely juvenile) idea for a Facebook application? An app that mimics the infamous Russian Roulette game but instead of a fatal shot to the head, the unlucky player has to post a self-demeaning Facebook status update.

Laugh as you might at this idea, something tells me it is exactly the kind of application that could do very well on Facebook. I can also think of a clever way in which the app could make money. If you want to build this app, let me know and I’ll fill you in.

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while folks – busy building something for a change. Here is a quick one (idea) – enable small businesses and individuals to tweet-in ads or classifieds during a TV programme. The solution could also be extended to cover online video, especially live ones.

Assuming you actually care what your Twitter followers think about your tweets, wouldn’t it be useful to have an app that does the following?

1. Analyses your followers’ tweets and streams including the links they contain, to determine their interests and then tells you the strength of tweet you are about to post in terms of its correlation with those interests.
2. Regularly displays fresh blog posts and tweets to you that your followers might like but that the majority of them have not tweeted about yet or seen in their streams.

I know, I know it’s a bit sad and if you really need a tool to tell you what to tweet then you probably don’t deserve any followers. If you are using Twitter for marketing though, as one or two (or 10 million) people do, I imagine you could find this really useful. Besides would you really bet against this sort of app becoming popular? Oh and for revenue, the app could use a combination of a freemium and ad-based model. A free ad-supported model that analyses only half your followers for example and a paid full version. Come to think of it, perhaps Twitter itself should build this tool.

1. Trash Twitter on your blog and all but swear to never use it. (See my post here)
   
2. Realise that no one cares what you think and that they all continue to rave about Twitter
3. Quietly try Twitter to see what all the fuss is about
4. Eat humble pie and admit publicly that you were wrong – Twitter does seem to be mildly useful after all (See update to same post above)
   
5. Now that the awkward admission and guilt are behind you, begin using Twitter with reckless abandon, dropping hashtags and RTs everywhere (My Twitter Profile)
   
6. Install Twitter widgets for your blog and begin auto-tweeting all your blog posts
7. Become a full-fledged Twitter evangelist and write a guide or two for Twitter newbies.This will be my next post.
   

By the way, it is not unusual to find that the transition from step 3 to 7 takes place considerably quicker than that from 1 to 3. Such is the power of the force called Twitter.

Still on Facebook and conversion, what if people who click on your Facebook ad could be greeted with “Dear John” (or whatever their name was) when they arrived on your landing page instead of a generic “Dear Facebook User”?

Facebook would of course need a user’s permission to do this and if they hadn’t received it, Facebook could let you include a ‘Personalise this Page’ button on your landing page and you could throw in an extra discount or some other incentive for users who click it. When a user clicks the button, the generic “Dear Facebook User” greeting could then change to “Dear John” and in addition, you could optionally prompt them to invite their friends who might be more interested in the offer etc.

As a marketer I would certainly pay for something like this. Wouldn’t you?

I am new to Twitter so I am still learning to tell my RTs from my @replies, DMs and hashtags – or is that #tags? Anyway, I think there might be some combination of all these Twitter elements that might enable it to support the implementation of a tool that I have long wished was available. Basically I want to be able to request a notification of the occurrence of some future event. E.g:

#TweetMeWhen: #android G1 enables app installs on SD Card; or

#TweetMeWhen: #CSI Season X is out on DVD

I would then want other people who are also interested in knowing this to be able to ‘follow’ the event somehow – note I use the term ‘follow’ loosely here to mean track. I would also want, along with all other followers of the event to receive a tweet when someone reports the event as happened.

I suppose everyone interested in an event could just favourite it and periodically monitor @replies to it but that does not really do the job. Any of you Twitter veterans out there have a better idea about how to achieve this without building a dedicated application for it?

One of my favourite products from this year’s Demo show was Zuora’s Z-Commerce for Facebook. With Facebook having failed to give application developers a way to sell their apps to users a la the iPhone’s app store, most of the developers have had to resort to free, frivolous apps that they then look to monetise through ads. This for the most part hasn’t worked. Enter Zuora’s Z-Commerce which apparently enables developers to plug-in tools for charging users for the use of their apps.

The Zuora Demo finished with the presenters asking the audience to think of a Facebook app that they would pay for. One might be forgiven for thinking that because Facebook users are already accustomed to free apps, they would be unlikely to want to pay for any apps. This may well be true but here is an idea for an app that I would seriously consider paying for if it were technically feasible and implemented.

The app I am thinking of would serve as an automatic birthday greeting messenger. In other words an app that would allow me to schedule birthday greetings and/or gifts to be sent to each of my Facebook friends as and when their birthdays come up. I don’t want to receive reminders about people’s birthdays so that I can manually send them greetings – I want the app to just send them.

Now I think the reason that such an app does not appear to exist currently (I dida cursory check) is that it gives users very little reason to revisit the app, which means the app would score low on Facebook’s scale of app popularity – number of monthly active users and more importantly, means that the app will make very little revenue if any from advertising. As a paid app however, a developer might care less about the number of monthly active users. Besides, you could always prompt members to come back to schedule greetings for newly added friends.

I do see one potential issue for such an app though – it might struggle to achieve viral growth because as a user of the app, I wouldn’t want recipients of my greetings to know that the greetings were auto-sent. This means that the whole value proposition of the app – hassle-free greetings – cannot be explicitly expressed in the Facebook News Feed and other viral channels. Still, I would gladly pay something like $4.99 a year for an app like this and perhaps pay upfront for 3 years.

Just watched the demo09 presentation by the company 7 Billion People. They operate in the space that I have repeatedly suggested Facebook should focus on – Conversion. My thinking is that assuming it is technically feasible, adding Facebook data to the algorithms that 7 Billion People currently uses in customising e-commerce user experiences could significantly increase the already impressive conversion rates that the company is claiming to deliver to its customers.