Do Everything Facebook Status and Tweet

First off, happy new year.

Secondly, I'm a huge fan of the status and the tweet. Especially syncing them. Not only is it cool to see 'via Twitter' on my Facebook page, but it's rewarding to be able to do one thing once and reach 2 different networks in 2 different veins.

BUT this is incomplete.

For the longest time I've wondered about including song lyrics and quotes in my status. I've always felt it wrong to do because whatever song I'd like to share or specific lyrics I'd like to display are not actually my 'status.' Moreover, the quote just seems to sappy to dive into in a status. It doesn't add any 'value' as far as the purpose of a status goes.

But what if the status box or the tweet box was customized and you could specify that you're "listening to...", "singing.." or "thinking..." for song titles, lyrics and quotes. You can do ANYTHING in the status and tweet box right now, but if there were prescribed beginnings that even made the status box look slightly different (i.e. add a music note to the corner of the box), it would look less weird and fulfill my urge to share that song in my head.

export survey responses

is there an online survey service that exports answers to excel?

i am doing data entry for a sociology project vis a vis exit polls. what a pain to enter all this data and although this had to be done because the environment in which we did it, i wonder how easy it'd be if say, survey monkey, exported responses to an easy-to-manage excel spreadsheet. or ...populated a google spreadsheet?!

When did I meet them???

Facebook has a rarely used ' I know so and so thru...'' feature whe you become friends w someone.

But some times I really want to know when and under what circumstances I met some people which I'd like to have for every person on facebook.

wonder if it's doable and useful

Google AdSense - Screening

So as a Harvard student, Google's archaic (ha!) web crawling/email reading technology always shows me ads for Harvard admissions etc. And all these services that I don't need. So why don't advertisers have the option for screening, i.e. they can say don't show ads to people with @fas.harvard.edu addresses?

export save and clean bookmarks

so i'm manually cleaning out my firefox bookmarks b/c i'm tired of seeing a huge list every time i go to the bookmarks area and it's just not a good look

why cant there be a program or app that exports the name/link for me?

Language appropriate ads

So I got an email from someone in China this morning. You know how some email providers place ads at the bottom of the message? Well, his ad was in Chinese. That's not going to sell me. It's not going to sell him...he doesn't see it.

Ads should pick up on the language of the recipient and display an appropriate ad, or just use English if it's going outside the native country. Elitist, I know.

But surely they can pick up on the tld's and know where this is going. @harvard.edu is not in Canada. and @yahoo.in isn't Pakistan.

All for now.

Flag emails

Right when you send emails, you should be able to flag it for the purpose of adding a follow up (previously written about), phone call or meeting. It's a hassle to have to manually schedule follow ups and not have a designated function or calendar for it.

Give me my contacts!

As always, the preface...this might already exist, but here we go

So I was typing an email (GMail) today and normally, I love how it will just show me the email address I'm looking for as I started typing...IF it's a contact of mine.

But why can't it just pull, not so much to cloud the truly relevant names and contact info, but pull the email adds in my extended FB network AND all of my friends.

Import it! You can imp/exp everything else...so why not this?

Search by color, image, font

As always, maybe this exists. And in spite of my blog name, this isn't strictly for the Web. Or Web 2.0 for that matter.

But anyway, so here's the issue. I use colors to sort a document I have that tracks progress with different foundations I'm working with for INeedAPencil.com.

But unlike ctrl F for text, I can't ctrl F for colors to find which ones I need to follow up with (which foundations, that is). Likewise, if I have a big doc where I need to replace all images (last week I was putting together a work manual, i.e. big document, for a different company and we need the logo on every page. but i didn't have the new one yet. so i used the old one as a placeholder in the meantime. granted, i had a header so indeed, all i changed was that..once. but maybe I need to ctrl f for a given image, or all images, and better yet, replace them all at once)?

Does this exist? Can it?

Just a thought

Unlike all other posts.

But I wonder how dense domain registration is. How few people out of all internet users have domains registered out of the billions of registered domains?

Email forwards unite

So email forwards are funny. But the formatting is shit. And usually it's hard to resd ultimately because of all the email addresses mixed in and the alignments. And so your inbox gets cluttered. So what if, with a technology tangentially similar to hitmelater, you could forward the email to a central service like list1@thisservice.com and it will send a properly formatted link to your given list. Also this site would take and display this humorous content in tagged formats on one central site. Central humor.

Wouldn't you rather get an email and follow a link than read a poorly formatted forward?

Needs more development but I like the idea.

facebook blog app

Hopefully this already exists but I'm not sure.

So I'm always logged into my FB, and it would be nice to be able to just blog right there. And my updates would go to my friends, the people who I want to read my posts the most. But my blogger account is separate and blogging seems to be a complete separate part of me.

I should just have a box in my profile that displays my latest post and allows me to upload a new one.

Thoughts?

Reverse phone lookup via FB

Okay, so today being my birthday, I'm getting messages from a lot of people, some of whom I don't have phone numbers for. But chances are, we're FB friends. I know FB has the phonebook application which is really cool and useful. I just used it yesterday to call one of my brother's friends to ask him to do something for my brother's going away party. Superuseful. But what if I could use FB as a yellowpages of sorts...?

Remote Web History

OK this might sound crazy, but so has a lot of other stuff that I've said in my lifetime.

What if you could remotely store your web history to access it from anywhere, anytime? Almost like Digg in that sense, but not really at all. The reason it came up was I was browsing some sites today and I don't have Digg installed on my work comp and I didn't want to bookmark these pages. That's one thing I didn't like about Digg too--bookmarks are major and prominent. You shouldn't have a hundred of them But web history is different. or should be IMO.

SO i was browsing and wish i could just go home and re-access what I was looking at when at work but it was impossible. and will be. that info and those sites are lost...forever!

anyway, the idea certainly needs to be fleshed out more but we'll see what happens in time. and didn't digg evolve from the bookmarks to personal news more? hm.

Rearrange Attachments/Bulk Attachments

So this morning I was sending a student some SAT vocab lists. In my email, I wanted to say that "First, is XYZ list and next is XYZ2 list..." and just typed that out because I always attach after writing. This is because of habit but also because you type your emails and then consider which materials need to be sent out. Do you attach before or after?

Well, some times it's convenient to be able to just hit an up arrow or a down arrow to make the order of your attachments correspond with how you describe them in the email.

Some files are easier to find than others, so when I need to send a file, I want to be able to just grab what I want to send when I see it. I come across some files before others and it can be annoying to have to go to really different places to pick files out. So why not be able to pick multiple items and upload them simultaneously? I know there's programs that let you do this but not for email attachments.

If GMail had this, it'd be great. Is there some way out there already? A clever workaround to make this happen?

Quality Search Engine

OK so apparently search engines are a hot topic right now what with the Cuil flop and talks about searching different via different media than text.

Well I want a quality-based search engine. Hear me out. Google works on page rankings through link-backs, 'relevance' and page popularity...basically.

But when I'm searching for advice about my Mac for example, I have to visit 10 different pages to get a good answer about how to free up space or make it run better. Sure, the pages brought back are popular but when did that become synonymous with quality? Moreover, with rankings working like this, popularity is just self-perpetuating. So if you can optimize and use SEO properly, work your meta tags, etc. on a subject early enough, it could be yours to rule right?

There's plenty of page/story rating services from Digg to Reddit, etc. but not for web pages as they correspond to what you search for. So for example, if I search 'mac cool' I (and a bunch of other people) might get pages about how Apple has a cool culture around it, etc. and then click on at least the first page to get a better sense for what these results have returned. This just makes this type of page rise in popularity for a topic none of us care about with these search words. Instead, I would vote down such a page and click/vote up pages that tell me how to make my Mac stop heating up and turning out its ridiculously loud fan.

I don't know. Maybe this is already being done or has been dismissed. Maybe there's issues with fraud/manipulation. I don't have much experience with building or any real understanding of how the technology behind search engines work, so please, enlighten me.

Google Analytics Milestones

So in my midst of research for one of my own websites, I was using GA to try and find when I first reached 1000 visitors, when I had my first 100 goal conversions, etc.

As far as I can tell, I can set data ranges to read data but cannot input say, a # of visitors and show all dates on which that occurred. Or even request mile stone days like highest this, highest that. Sure, I can just graph out the entire time period and look at when the graph spikes, but it'd be far easier to do reverse lookups.

Does this already exist in GA (or Urchin or elsewhere)? Any other useful benefits of reverse data look up or other searches through your web analytics?

Note: I know that milestones and 'goals' exist, but what I mean is different.

No more signatures!

One thing that really gets me is email conversations in GMail (and probably other email clients, as well) where the 'signatures' aggregate to make the email take up my entire entire screen when the email text should only take a couple lines. I only need a given person's information one time or should even be able to 'Hide Signatures'. This is particularly annoying on my BlackBerry when I end up having to scroll through a bunch of sig's so I don't miss any of the actual email content.

If sig's were scripted as some sort of separate entity (I'm still a coding newb), which they seem to be since they are a component of GMail and BB 'settings', then they should be capable of isolation.

I would love to 1. hide signatures 2. show signatures 3. only show signatures for first reply email in a conversation.

Any thoughts? Is there anything for this yet?

Prioritize the Mini Feed

Maybe there is a fix to this already with apps and privacy settings on FB but here's my idea:

You should be able to give people higher priority and lower priority for appearances on your mini feed. I really don't want to see some people's comments on other people's wall; it seems inherently peeping. I know FB has the thumbs up/thumbs down function but it doesn't seem nearly as effective as me saying, 'These are my close friends. I want to follow their stories more closely and see more of what they're up to. I could care less about knowing someone i don't even remember meeting has joined a new group.'

There are consequences. FB helps us keep in touch with the fringes; this counteracts that. Also, advertisers like leveraging the breadth of our social networks to say SO and SO is a fan of this or that. I even used that technique as an advertiser in the past and albeit hard to say for sure, it works well. So if I limit my news to a few people, it might limit the scope of ads I receive and the number of impressions FB can deliver (or maybe they'll fill the space any way. anyone know?).

Anyway, I want to separate my news feed better. Any other innovations in this space?

Delete your ipod

Well, not really. But you should be able to delete songs right off of your iPod. Free up space and streamline the process of cleaning up your library.

Read up a service, Tune Up ,I believe, that basically cleans up your tags and song titles. There is a lot of innovation possible with iTunes; I'd like to discuss this more.

Memoreez

New spin on microblogging. Update your personal journal and tag people involved with funny stories and memories in your life. Submit photos, text and more by your phone and a web app.

Sorting Blogs

So today I started work and needed to get in touch with a lot of blogs in the healthcare industry. I was dumbfounded by how hard it was to pull together this scattered data and make it easy to contact people.

A blog directory sorted by their tags, user-submitted titles, content areas and more. The contact info is accessible to premium members.

Follow up emails

As a budding entrepreneur, I email out a lot of people who I need to follow up with in order to make something happen. I have to be dead persistent. They don't come to me.

When I send emails out though, it's very difficult to track my past contact with someone and when I need to get in touch again in the future and contingent on xyz happening.

Now I'm getting into CRM territory and things like SalesForce or other things. I don't intend to go so far. Let's stick with this niche of follow up emails for the average person who's not going to use SalesForce.

Solution: Via GMail, when I send an email, just as much as I can forward something or add an event to my calendar, I should be able to hit 'Follow Up' and integrate a time/date to send a follow up email to someone via my GCal. Then when the time comes, an 'email compose' window or the previous conversation (whatever I choose at the time) shows up and I can follow up quickly and easily. When I make the 'follow up' event, I can enter notes also to remember what needs to be achieved or remembered in this follow up email.

Just the basic idea. A lot of potential to build this out.

Catchpatch Catch

I think that's what the name is. But it's not. It's close. I'm talking about the dis

WAIT

Just googled 'distorted images website registration' CAPTCHA

OK so they're free apparently which is great but they need some work.

Problem: Trying to make a new Blogger acct today for this Blog, I mistyped the CAPTCHA. Not in haste. Not for fun. I couldn't read it. This is a problem...it's so good, it keeps even the right people out (and not just the evil bots).

Solution: Why don't CAPTCHA's make registration more effective fun and even more secure by asking intelligent questions? Maybe a current event you HAVE to know. Or give 3 options for questions to answer if the q might be too intelligent. Show a pic of GW Bush and ask people 'who is this?' or ask where the Olympics are this summer (might be too intelligent so then you need options)

Anyway, just my 2 cents on this for now.

Export Facebook Birthdays

Idea: Export FB birthdays to your Google Calendar and GMail. This will allow me to receive easier birthday updates on my Google Cal, so I can plan ahead of the day or 2 for some of my more important friends' birthdays. Sure I should know it off the top of my head, but I don't really.

Exporting it would not only allow me to plan ahead but also if I could export this info into Google services somehow then I could ping people easier because I send email happy birthdays instead of what has now become so impersonal...the FB post.

Interesting observation: My 'personal' emails on birthdays are so well received by people. We are beyond phones and face to face's. Emailing for a birthday is now personal, at least for acquaintances and pretty close friends. Don't email your wife on her birthday and forget the flowers.

Other thoughts: Not sure if this will happen bc of the GOOG/FB competition and FB's stranglehold on data, but maybe. With FriendCSV app (started by a coke scholar!) on FB you can export all your friend's data...except contact info. So maybe with that CSV and Google...you could import that data into your contacts and make a setting to receive notifications.

But I want a 'Birthday/Anniversaries' etc. Cal on my Goog Cal.