If you could gather together some of the smartest Web developers and ask them to brainstorm a killer app for you, what would you ask them to build? Oh, and they will only have 45 minutes to do it. That is the task set for me at the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in Miami (Feb. 28 to March 1). I will be moderating a panel that will include Kevin Rose of Digg, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and several other Web app superstars (the conference organizers are trying to rope in Blaine Cook of Twitter and Cal Henderson of Flickr into the panel as well, schedules permitting). The goal of the panel: Come up with a killer Web app in 45 minutes.
So what should I have them build? Please vote for the choices below or, better yet, suggest an app yourself in comments. Who knows, some crack developer in the audience might just go ahead and build it. (BTW, any TechCrunch readers in Florida who want to go to the conference will get a 15 percent discount with this promotional code: discTCMIAMI08)
- A Webwide Reputation System
- Cloud Computing
- Social Finance
- Webmail—An Alternative to Gmail
- Search
- Life Streaming
- Video Messaging/Publishing
Total Votes: 2598
Started: February 12, 2008
A real time video conferencing app that starts streaming that very panel live
Hy,
I use this one is the best
http://www.livestream.com
an online webapp creator
An app that can make other killer applications in 45 minutes.
Time Waste monitor. You put in all your social profiles, RSS feeds and such, and it’ll tell you how much time you waste in a variety of ways. Daily, Weekly, per feed per day, per social network per year and so on!
Ok, might be a bit of a stretch for 45mins and be just as time wasting as what it monitors!
A Webwide Reputation System & Life stream seems crucial to me.
What are cloud computing and social finance apps?
A simple workflow application. There are tons of simple web based form applications and a handful of database applications (Zoho, Dabble DB, Coghead, etc…) but I haven’t found a cost effective (yet useful) solution for creating an ad hoc workflow (i.e. user A submits form, user B receives email link to form, reviews and populates additional fields and submits to user C for final approval)
Users of Dabble DB, Cognhead, Zoho, and other “simple” database sites would benefit from something like this. Web forms are nice, but you often need a few levels of approval before adding information to the database.
If I’ve overlooked some applications, please enlighten me. If not, that’s my suggestion.
@3 , thats what I was going to say
but 45 minuites , is this just to show how silly the billions invested in these startups actually is
I would call it TalkAboutIt but that name is taken. It’s a social site where you can talk to another person about whatever. Talk…not type. Audio…not video. You start by maybe choosing a topic from a tag cloud. Maybe it’s obama, or prius or atheism or calculus or patriots. You get hooked up with another soul and you talk. Like a phone call. It’s relaxed. Unscripted. No prep work. No post-production. No pressure. After you finish, both of you can opt to share the call. And it gets published.
A lot of people go to this site just to listen. Generally in the evening. Relaxing, like comfort food. Like listening to Bill Maher sit down with Larry King. They’re our favorite uncles. We let them into our living rooms. Eventually you gravitate to a handful of kindred spirits.
And so you can develop a small following. But small in Internet terms might mean a thousand people. It’s the Long Tail. Imagine the bleachers in a high school gym filled to capacity. These are your adoring fans who plug in every night just to hear your next post.
What can be more satisfying than this? The baby-boomers now have nothing to fear. Good company and genteel conversations will see us through old age. Never be lonely again.
This one-on-one, strictly audio format has many advantages over its cousins — podcasts, youtube videos, skypecasts, etc. We gave podcasting a chance, didn’t we? Hosting a podcast is just too much work, so not that many people do it. Those that do, often just ramble or act crazy, or try amateurishly to emulate talk show hosts. Yawn. We want compelling content. We want drama. We want genuine.
Two people. Now that’s compelling. No script. Now that’s drama. And it’s civil. It’s intimate. It’s genuine. But not four people. Group chat on the Internet tends to degenerate. Skype had (has?) something called skypecasting where anonymous strangers would wander into the discussion and usually spoil things. That doesn’t happen when it’s just two souls.
Video, like podcasting, is also too much work. You have to look good for the camera. Lighting is important. You have to be somewhere presentable. And in most cases all you get out of the deal is a talking head. Not worth it. And the talking head only draws attention away from what’s said and the texture of the voice.
The site I’m working on uses a thumbs up system. You can thumbs up but not thumbs down. Your recommendations are public. The person you recommend will be notified. People you’ve recommended will show on your profile as will the number of thumbs up you receive. Based on thumbs, the site can recommend people for you to listen to, just like amazon recommends books. And you will be recommended to others.
The site will make use of de.licio.us style toolbar buttons for your browser. This way you can start a talk-about topic for the page or blog entry you are reading. There will be facebook and OpenSocial apps that link you and your posts to other social networks.
Mobile will work too. Talk and/or listen as easily from a rest spot along your hike, as from the lazyboy in your den.
That’s it in a nutshell. The devil is in the details. Killer in my humble opinion.
What do they expect to prove by putting a couple of people on stage who have designed amazing applications in the past? This stems from the unfortunate theory that killer app ideas just pop up out of thin air and that past success means better ideas. Sometimes product management interviews are like this: “Show us how creative you are by spewing out ideas!” (But, where are the users? What are the problems I’m solving?)
I’d be much more interested in hearing, for example, what Digg thought it would be, and then what its users told Digg they wanted it to be.
What the world needs now is a better way to find relevant, local news that is customizable and comprehensive.
Right now, the online news world is so fragmented that finding things that matter to each individual is most of the adventure.
There are many people who like technology that don’t know about TechCrunch. There are plenty of people in Atlanta that probably don’t know about what’s going on at their city council meetings.
That is not to say they don’t want to know. They just can’t find the information because the resources are not made available to compile the information important to them.
What the world needs is a killer app that organizes local news and information.
Ok i voted for the webmail option but wanted to expand a little
2 things that are needed right now (in my opinion anyway) in email are new ways to sort your email and new ways to receive
Sort: new ideas on how to group your mail such as ‘most emails from’ etc
Ways to receive: mail rss feeds etc
Just my 2 cents…
Better news personalization and syndication.
Voted for the webmail, but I think Gmail just needs improvement.
A contact sync would be nice.
Online and collaborative accounting and finance is one area that has barely been explored. Not only would it help to eliminate accounting errors, it would also make the practice more transparent within an organization and reduce the possibility of corruption, theft and fraud.
Also, to the person who suggested a web app to build web apps, check out Zoho.
@Mike Robinson
Rescuetime seems to be going in this direction…
What exactly is kevin rose doing on the panel. He couldn’t write a compiling line of code if his life depended on it!
I too had the question about the “cloud computing” option in the survey. Are you envisioning something that would hook into the various hosting offerings (like Amazon’s EC2 or GoGrid)?
But my other thought on this was…ok, you built the app in 45 minutes (or less). Now what? Can you get it hosted and live on the internet on a new server in less than 10 minutes? “Build it and they will come” doesn’t really apply here. “Build it” is taken care of with this conference but wouldn’t it also be great to be able to quickly showcase the work?
Personally, I think Web 3.0 will be all about “integration” (the way Web 2.0 is about “social networking”) so for me the ideal app would be something that integrates all of the various social networking tools into one app…but I guess that Google is spearheading this with OpenSocial?
Interesting ideas though. I think that with FaceBook and others leading the way for integration and social networking that we will be seeing a lot in terms of rapid application development AND deployment.
Thanks for the post!
I’m all about life hacking so why not something to make peoples offline lives easier?
things like:
-voicemail to email service
-better money management than mint
-trip-planner that will text/call you route and weather conditions as well as recommended places of interest on schedule with your route for that day.
-family or friends notifications/organization for events like parties
@17 … I know man, thats like having Richard Stallman and Donald Trump on a panel. I understand it’s not going to be about writing code. its like coming up with Ideas. and passing them off to super coders using CRUD languages like Ruby on Rails… so my guess is it will run like an extreme development team. one person types the others make suggestions. I don’t think its going to pan out though… unless the app is 98% generated, and the template kits are prefabbed.
Hey why don’t you see what the Donald is doing, maybe he can contribute
@Michael Sheehan
I agree man. Web 3.0 will be about complete portability, everything will have an api… your train home, your cars gas tank, your houses alarm system, your bank account, everything. I envision mash-ups going to a whole new level of awesomeness!
I’m going to stay hush-hush and just observe. Why would i post my idea on here?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!
An alternative to blackboard.com
This system is terrible and seems so antiquated. I’d love some fresh ideas.
DotComGuy, salesforce.com does exactly that, thought maybe that’s too much for your needs?
A webwide reputation system, but not related/involved with Digg at all, because their community has a negative bias.
How about Techcrunch2.com
That will be a nice web app
SimpleBucket – Something’s brewing
Real Simple Image Hosting
http://www.simplebucket.com
out of the choices, in reality, the only thing you could even come close to in 45 minutes and have something usable is…
Life Streaming (ala friendfeed? this can be done just by aggregating RSS feeds)
A Webwide Reputation System (essentially one entity Person and a Comment entity … then tie in authorization and messaging/flagging )
use Django as the web framework, a few open source projects from google code, blueprint CSS open source project, and you’ll be set.
social finance is just a bad idea overall
I’m unclear. They have 45 minutes to brainstorm and figure it out or 45 minutes to brainstorm and actually build it?
If you need to build it:
1. Build on social networking platform: most of the infrastructure is done for you.
2. Mashup existing things: gives a fast, visually appealing result.
Since when is Kevin Rose a web developer?
Maybe they could come up with an idea to help solve the problem of the internet breaking under the weight of all the KR love data that keeps on being written :p
The logical conclusion for information technology devices is the tricorder.
Build me a portable tricorder damn it!
I don’t see the point. 45 minutes is just not enough time to do anything, especially if they are limited to the options you have presented. I’d like to see someone create a Cloud Computing service in 45 minutes… yeah right
Scalability?
What about the video equivalent of an RSS widget. Think in terms of Qik, LiveCastr, UStreamTV, etc.
You subscribe to various live and recorded video streams/show(s), and if any go live, the App alerts you, you click on it, and up pops up a mini ‘cloud’ version of the video.
If something like this exists, please continue talking amongst yourselves.
One extra requirement for the reputation system, or for any other killer web app that you create….it has to work with *any* browser or device. There are already more mobile phones than PCs and Macs for connecting to the web. As the devices become more capable, the browsers improve, and bandwidth goes up, the majority of people will use these devices to access web apps. It’s easy to build an app that works with Firefox on a notebook or laptop, but I also want it to work with the Nokia N95, Nokia N810, Blackberry Curve, Danger’s Sidekick, and so on. Then I know that I will be able to use your application no matter how I access your site.
I went with life streaming application, because I feel like smart people could actually pull something together using APIs in 45 minutes. The others are already being worked on by companies with big budgets and long timelines. I haven’t seen as much interesting work being done in the life streaming arena.
@#17 … thank you for saying that so i didn’t have to… (then again, is Erick a programmer?? )
i reckon the idea is to build a think-tank, see. These people are not going to “build” anything… they will need to conceptualize it in 45 minutes i bet…. think about all the weekend startup events that are brimming with *ahem* actual programmers… and they never complete anything remotely resembling a web app, and thats in 48 hours!! not minutes….
another deceptive headline from the spinmeister…
hehe
How about a Twitter service on top of twitter that won’t crash. Would be easy to build. Focus, obviously, would be on scalability…
Definitely a better reputation system. We already have a million versions of each of the other choices. The closest thing we have now is scattered auction websites and bits & pieces from various websites. The Google Social Graph API is a step in that direction but I don’t know if it’s heading the right way.
Wonder what the 63 people who selected “Video messaging/publishing” are doing – there’s way too many of these already and I don’t see any of them serving a real need.
I cannot vote until you define what the various poll options mean. “Social finance?” Is that communism?
KILLER APP – interactive streaming video example for university/college market by series A venture Realview TV ® backed by the guys who funded careerbuilder, mindspring, t-mobile. They have one for the auto/dealer market as well. Cheers,
GLS
Thanks for all the great suggestions!
To answer some of the questions raised, we were going to shoot for having a functioning app at the end of the panel using something like Coghead, but decided that was too ambitious and might slow the panel down. This is really just a brainstorming session to conceive and define the app, and how it would work.
Buy social finance I mean an app like Cake Financial or Mint that brings in financial data from all the members to make each one smarter and, hopefully, wealthier.
By cloud computing, it is oen ended, but I was thinking more along the lines of what’s the next step after S3/EC2/etc. We have Web-based computation, storage, querying, and databases. What’s next. Could be built on top of Amazon or as a standalone.
A “Find Osama” flash game that uses Google Earth for images.
uber widget/panel:
a “live” application with a multimedia dashboard (videos, blog posts, usenet posts, message board posts, chat snips, photos, ap news, etc) of a singular topic – topic modifiable by the user on the fly – that is constantly updated; the widget/panel is pushed new updates every x seconds based on a set of search crawlers constantly scouring the web and hundreds of key sites. to the end-user it translates into a semi-live stream of information and vids and pics, etc. that can be viewed in a lean-back state.
Write-in choice: a web app that comes up with viable business models for other web apps.
I would love to see a webmail client done in Adobe Flex.
A good online PDF reader, online banking/financial.
a super dooper pooper scooper
WoH!! 45 minutes.And i will get my application designed.I like the sound of it.
The site can recommend people for you to listen to, just like amazon recommends books. And you will be recommended to others. The site will make use of de.licio.us style toolbar buttons for your browser. This way you can start a talk-about topic for the page or blog entry you are reading. There will be facebook and OpenSocial apps that link you and your posts to other social networks.
By the way, what´s happened with digg? It´s giving problems, it doesnt allow me login.
I would have to vote on a Single ID system that guarantees authenticity, security, and universality.
Username/Password proliferation is just absolutely ridiculous in the Web society today.
-rsh