Building a stable of applications... »

From time to time I've mentioned a project called 'momentum' in my posts...momentum basically is a "Dating system for content and common interests".

The system we are developing basically collects and analyzes open information passing through various parts of the internet...it then uses this information to match people to content and other people they share common interests with (I say 'we', but actually Donnie has been doing most of this back end development work so far)

We have been starting with primarily with Tweets (via Twitter's search API -- and for now we search for specific kinds of Tweets) but the system is actually being designed to scale to a variety of sources and that's part of the bigger, long term goal.

The system is also being built as an API from the start...so once it's running the way we want, we will be able to build lots and lots of our own simple apps on top of it to address various markets that we either have a personal interest in or that we just see a large money making opp. in...and we can eventually offer up the API itself to other developers (and hopefully monetize that in some way as well).

The main thing that the system does right now is determine the relevance of words in a document...so basically given a bunch of text, we can figure out what the most relevant words are for that text (and tie those to people that are the most relevant for a given word)...while it probably doesn't seem all that exciting, framed in the right light, it's actually proving to be VERY powerful (and therefor pretty exciting for all of us involved in the project so far).

Anyway - while Donnie's been working on much of the back end, I've been working on doing a handful of front end apps as proof of concepts to get us started (and maybe build a little bit of traction with users)...and most recently Pat has jumped on board to help me skin some of these apps. so that they are more user friendly (both in usability and look/feel).

Here's a quick breakdown of our initial front end app ideas/plans...some of which are already working in some limited fashion (but will be improved upon a lot over the next few months):

FUBNUB.COM - A service to pull/aggregate data feeds from around the internet, reformat them, and then republish them to yet another system.

HALFBITE.COM - A handful of basic apps to analyze Twitter streams and Twitter users.

JIVEGAS.COM - A system for tracking the popularity of a given link across multiple systems (eventually a system to also help you manage/improve the buzz around a given link across multiple internet systems).

STORYRANK.COM - A lucene backed ranking system feed and supported by a widget (that nobody uses right now and that we'll probably rethink/rebuild going forward)

FUZZYPOP.COM - A lucene backed search engine for the data and people passing through our momentum system (basically a small scale google-like system with a more real-time and trending focus).

PU.LY - We don't actually have a specific idea here yet, but I'm thinking about something related to people and reputation or interests (either information/analysis about people, or something to introduce people to each other).

TIMELYLINKS.COM - Introduce people to new and interesting (to them based on information already listed online about them) links being feed through systems like Twitter.

TWEETWIKI.COM - Information gathered around a given topic via tweets.

At least those are some of the ones I've already identified and/or started some front end development on...we are also building a small app to show 'spark lines' for words that are trending up or down the most for the last few days (but I don't have a URL to share with the world on that one yet)...and we have been internally kicking around a handful of other potential things on the short list...

But I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for all of this...what do you think of the ideas? And more importantly, what applications or systems don't exist yet that you would like to see us work on?