pigeonbeaks.com

Question - which website is run by a single person (actually, it sounds like he’s recently got his first employee), earns $30k a day ($10 millski a year) and boasts 500,000 unique log-ins per day?

Er…..that would be Plenty of Fish, a leading online dating service run by Markus Frind, that looks to do for dating what Craigslist did for classified advertising.

See this ReadWriteWeb article for talk of a $1bn valuation…sweet.

“Cuz you know theres otha fish in the sea, that is, in the sea,
In the sea that is” ….Pharcyde lyrics dontcha know

It was probably about a year ago that I first heard about StumbleUpon. It got noted in the “must check it out some time” mental category, one which is hugely over-flowing. And then, like all brilliant applications it just kept getting mentioned; by friends, in news articles, bloggers, everywhere. So I finally bit the bullet and installed it; absolutely superb. How did I ever manage without it? My own internet slave, instantly ready and eager to serve me internet-zen whenever it’s wanted (which is very, very often). How else would I have found this list of the world’s most beautiful libraries?

So thanks to BoredStop.com, StumbleUpon and Flickr user “Curious Expeditions” whose photo it was. I must get round to visiting the Strahov Monestary library some day…

I just found a great blog post by Chris Brogan (I’ll have to check out his site again, I hadn’t heard of it previous to finding it via Digg) entitled “100 blog topics I hope you write”.
It’s a great idea for a post; I like it because it’s a great way to interact with other bloggers/members of the internet community (and his blog’s tagline is “A Conversation with a Community about Digital Relationships”) so it’s a fantastic example of him doing just that.
I also like it because “Number 22 - If I were an Advertiser today” is exactly what I thought about a few nights ago. So Chris, if you’re reading, here goes:

If I were an Advertiser today, I would look to take advantage of the recent explosion (last five years) in satellite-imaging technology and the respective mapping services offered by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc.
Why? Because you’ve got tens of millions of pairs of eyes actively seeking out interesting landmarks/geological features/buildings etc from a new perspective - the bird’s eye view.
When these users find something interesting they share the location with other users, and we see the viral effect, usually associated with emails/photos/videos etc. and sometimes these “discoveries” end up in newspapers too (even more eyeballs).

I would take advantage by exploring methods to effectively exploit this new strategy by launching campaigns that could be seen from the sky and captured by satellite imaging:

- Huge logos on flat roofs/in fields/old quarries
- “Joke” campaigns like the recent doughnut-brandishing Homer (to promote the Simpsons film)
- Working with political parties to create politically-based campaigns

It’s not an entirely original idea, just one which I think has plenty of scope for development.

Thanks Chris for a great blog post, it’s got people responding and interacting with you, and each other.

One of the most exciting aspects of people being able to come together via the internet is choosing an avatar to represent you in an online world (once you’ve managed to choose the online world you wish to inhabit that is, there are over 120 according to wikipedia at the time of writing).

My last article was on body modifications - when the body you’re modifying is made of pixels, well, I guess the modification is going to be a whole lot quicker, easier, cheaper and versatile. I was recently given a great book on this subject - Alter Ego; Avatars and their creators. It explores the identities of a few chosen characters who inhabit such metaverses - who are they, where do they live, what do they do for a living and crucially, why did they choose the online world that they did, and what drew them to their character?

The book shows a photograph of the person on one page, with their avatar on the opposite page, here is my favourite, Jason Rowe from Crosby in Texas:

From the book: “in Star Wars Galaxies I can ride an Imperial speeder bike, fight monsters, or just hang out with friends at a bar”. That’s just so cool - good work Jason (Rurouni Kenshin), maybe I’ll meet you online one day…

The modern day equivalent of browsing through a book of interesting facts (Guiness book of records, Schott’s miscellany etc.), is surfing sites like wikipedia for interesting articles, Flickr and Photobucket for interesting photos, and social networking sites for people you know.

I reckon we can add one more to the list - surfing through the facebook “Common Interest - Beliefs and Causes” groups (they tend to be more interesting than the other groups).

Here’s a collection of ten such groups that caught my little pigeon eye recently…

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…