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Facebook has been in the news a lot in the past year, both due to its increasing popularity and the fact that it opened its system architecture to 3rd party developers who can now code applications that users add to their profiles. Some of these applications have taken off, with many millions of users adding them (you’ll find a list of the “hottest” applications here) And specuation is rife that some of these applications may be worth a lot of money; effectively they are platforms within a platform.

A feature that is missing as far as I can tell, is the ability of users to search for women who get married and changed their names. It effectively means that old friends have a much reduced chance of finding them (there’s still a chance through friends of friends etc. but that may not always be the case). Perhaps Facebook will at some point add a piece of functionality that gets around this problem (allowing women to add their original last name somewhere). Until then, it strikes me that a developer could do a lot worse than creating an app to get around this problem somehow.

So how would it work? Well, married women with different last names would add the application to their profile and merely enter their original last name into a text box. Other people adding the application would search for old female friends using the exact same application, using the data it collects from the married women. The app would give a list of search results in the usual fashion which the user could then review in order to find their friend.

The great thing for the developer wanting mass adoption of their application is that it would mean that users would want it regardless of their relationship status i.e. men and unmarried women (and married women who retained their last names) would still want to add it in order to search for married women who did change their names.

Now, usually when I spot an opportunity that I think is fairly obvious there’s a good reason why I’m wrong:

1. I don’t know enough about the industry/topic to be able to make the call in the first place because I’m missing a fundamental point which invalidates the analysis

2. What I have deduced is pretty much correct, but it would actually take a lot of hard work and skill to pull it off (meaning that lots of other people have spotted it too, a few of which may be working on it).

3. What I have deduced is correct, and even if someone else has arrived at the same conclusion, they haven’t blogged about it (or written about it elsewhere on the web) - and I if they have, I didn’t find it when searching for it (which admittedly, I don’t always do that vigorously; think: first two or three pages of google).

So the question is, have I missed something fundamental? Does there currently exist such an application? (I certainly couldn’t find an existing one by searching the list of current apps on the site). Or is there not one due to a very good reason?

Do you agree that it would be a useful app? Can the idea be taken further?

If it’s a good idea and somebody develops such an application let me know…

I enjoy finding new blogs that have carved a real niche interest, the kind that make me think “Wow, I never realised such and such could be quite so interesting!”

One such blog that I came across the other day was the Strange Maps blog (whose mission statement isn’t actual stated, but it’s pretty obvious).

This post includes a NASA map, highlighting the solar eclipses for the period 2001 - 2025. It provides some usual commentary and got me thinking about perspectives again. Why do the bands look the way they do? (curved, more so nearer the poles). Would you be able to see the bands from the moon?

And it reminded me of just how clever we are, being able to work this stuff out. What equations are used in such calculations and would a person of average intelligence ever be able to understand them, ever be able to derive them for themselves?

Thanks to Strange Maps for getting me to think about these things. And thank you to NASA for being creating the map in the first place.