Real-time Product Idea
I have a problem (aka a new business opportunity).
I have many interests—ranging from music, graffiti art, technology, business, sports, angel investing, macroeconomics, gadgets, Washington DC (birthplace), San Francisco (post college home) and on and on…
This has lead to me either connecting and or “following” a large number of people and organizations through my various online and mobile networks (Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn). Which is cool.
Here is the problem: I am only interested in a subset of information from a given individual or organization.
For example, I mostly follow Jack Dorsey because I like getting his updates on Square.
I follow Ted Leonsis because of his personal investments
I follow Fred Wilson because of his very practical web product & investing thoughts
However when you look at the last 10 tweets from these individuals, the breakdown is as follows:
- Jack: 2 posts are expressly about Square / 8 are not
- Ted: 1 post is expressly about investing / 9 are not
- Fred: 8 posts are expressly about web & investing / 2 are not (pretty good Fred!!)
Therefore, of 30 posts in my feed, 10 are relevant to what I am actually looking for.
That means there is a lot of noise. And considering three people generate 20 lines of noise, it becomes unbearable when you follow or are friends with or linkededin to 1000 people.
Facebook’s feature of allowing you to hide people from your feed reduced a bunch of noise. But it didn’t solve the problem because in general, I don’t want to hide all of their stuff (just most of it). Specifically, I am only interested in their real-time thoughts related to a very specific reason.
So what next?
Option 1: Facebook, twitter and or LinkedIn could innovate and produce a solution
Option 2: Someone in the twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn eco-system could create a solution (I heard Xobni built a Facebook app that delivered the actual contents of Facebook mail to your email because they found it annoying that Facebook didn’t already do that…and it was a huge hit); I also heard the entire team at Posterous scored above 1500 on their SAT’s so they could probably figure something out
Option 3: I’d be willing to invest in and work with a team to try and solve the problem ourselves.
I’d love to hear from people (craigjshapiro-at-yahoo.com). See if you have the same frustration. And if so, if I am missing any options.
-Craig
