Making something useful?

[Script47]

I want to make something useful which will help people in their daily lives. Something which people would use. Any ideas? Web based.

[Chris]

Something that makes money for everyone automatically.
Something that can control the temperature of your home.
A way to instantly communicate crime amongst one another.
A way to prove that America was behind the attack on MH17.

[vitinho444]

That's what every developer wants i guess.. Chris' ideas are pretty good though

[Valkyrie]

I always though it'd be interesting to aggregate twitter results into a graph based off keywords, like explosion or bomb, to detect potential events as people are tweeting them in certain regions. Like scraping twitter for all users with a location set in Egypt, during the protests for example, and then as tweets include keywords denoting things like an explosion or attack, a bubble grows over the region so you can see that a common event is trending. Never really got too far into the idea though, but predictive models like that are always useful at the least from a big data standpoint

[Verahta]

Might want to use R for the analysis part.

[vitinho444]

I always though it'd be interesting to aggregate twitter results into a graph based off keywords, like explosion or bomb, to detect potential events as people are tweeting them in certain regions. Like scraping twitter for all users with a location set in Egypt, during the protests for example, and then as tweets include keywords denoting things like an explosion or attack, a bubble grows over the region so you can see that a common event is trending. Never really got too far into the idea though, but predictive models like that are always useful at the least from a big data standpoint

That's a good idea, but it's kinda sad that when something bad happens people just tweet about it... Even those you suffered tweet about it, what is wrong with this world?

[Xaos]

Well it is a good, fast way to spread information and condolences.


To do something useful, you need a problem or a question. Think of a question or problem you have and solve it. I'm working on an economical model because I'm curious about the difference in revenue of income tax vs no income tax but increased sales tax. This can be your question/problem or it can be someone elses, but chances are if its yours, its also someone elses

[kaos78414]

Check out this article by Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Even if it doesn't lead you to something you want to build, it's a great read with loads of great advice.

[vitinho444]

Check out this article by Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Even if it doesn't lead you to something you want to build, it's a great read with loads of great advice.

Thanks

[Xaos]

Great read, and I reiterate 100x what he said.