Project Idea #1
Problem statement: Find an effective way to socialize with a subset of friends interested in a particular topic online
User group: short-term - my friends and myself, long-term - anyone looking to collaborate and socialize in a personal environment
I am a big sports fan. I find myself using a hodgepodge of methods to communicate with different subsets of friends about different sporting events/teams/etc. I might speak to one friend using Hangouts, another set using text messages, a third group over whatsapp, and interact with the world at large over Twitter. Instead of having to manage numerous different platforms and apps, it would be good to have a single platform for connecting with my friends. The types of things I’d like to be able to do include:
- collaborate/socialize with a moderately-sized group of people (2-25) about a common topic of interest
- chat with members of the group individually as well as a whole
- aggregate relevant third-party content (e.g. tweets, videos, articles, etc), and be able to view in a single location
- share third-party content (e.g. tweets, videos, articles, etc) with the group. lets call these ‘streams’.
- share numerous instances of streams, each corresponding to a different topic, within the same general group
- allow individuals to select which streams they would like to view
- schedule and plan events (e.g. game watching parties, etc) specific to streams or subsets of individuals with calendar integration
While there are fragmented solutions that can overlap to solve the problem, I am interested in investigating whether there is a viable holistic solution that will simplify the process.
At face value, the biggest challenge is getting all of my friends to use the same platform. If everyone was well-versed in Twitter (i.e. had an account, knew how to use the service, and was diligent about using it), then this problem would not even come up. Finding a common interface for the wide array of services will be an important challenge to tackle. Another challenge is getting permissions to pipe in third-party content. Content-providers are protective of their data, and unless we can demonstrate value to them in allow us to pipe in their data, they may not cooperate.
There are some custom apps (like BleacherReport) which focus on providing heavily-tailored content to users. Other apps (like Whatapp) do a great job of providing a forum for groups of people to chat. I’ve already spoken about Twitter, which is data-rich, but requires user education and adoption amongst a population to leverage the social aspects. Slack does this well, but is exclusively a work app, and people are averse to applying a work application for personal use. Slack also doesn’t have a rich content engine, though I suppose one could be built via a plugin.