10 apps I’m not going to build for 10K Apart
10K Apart is a nifty little contest I heard about from @limedaring (and if you haven’t seen her work or her co-founder post, I thoroughly recommend doing so). The concept’s pretty much as it says on the tin: do something nifty in under 10K. Of course, most of the highly interesting-looking apps submitted so far make liberal use of the “external API” provision; these days, you can outsource the logic, so why not?
The deadline’s on the 25th (next Wednesday) so if you have time but lack inspiration, here are ten things I would be looking at building if I weren’t so busy performing advanced CPR on FestBuzz. (Which, by the way, has up to date listings now! So it’s *half* done…)
In no particular order, and with no particular guarantee any of these are achievable within 10K (but several probably are):
Collaborative short story improv/writing
Much like those round-robin fold-over note stories you used to do as a kid (surely they had a proper name). Each successive visitor adds a sentence blindly, or with the last sentence only on view. At some predetermined N sentences, the entirety is revealed and everyone who submitted a part is notified. Probably needs some kind of web database API.
Minify/10K This
Meta-apps are fun. Could you write an app that, given another app, minifies it and tells you if it’s under 10K, with suggestions for compression? I’m sure you could.
Petrol Money Jar
For the love of god, give this a better name. This is something that could be 10K, probably won’t be, but could qualify as part of the X.com PayPal developer challenge too. Bumming lifts off friends all the time gives you a residual level of guilt. Automatically pay your mates via PayPal when they’re filling up at the petrol station; simplest version is just a pre-filled one-click “Give my driver $10″ button, but think of what you could do with geo and mobile. Track the journey, track the exact petrol station and thus the gas price, enter in the car’s make and model to get the average mpg, and get exact petrol division. Kapow.
Twitterfluff
Enter a website you like (RSS feed) or account that you follow more or less religiously. Enter a time period. Twitterfluff retweets for you every day/few hours with a randomly generated commentary comment to make it look less artificial. E.g. “RT @TechCrunch AT&T Still Not Connecting Calls http://tcrn.ch/abcDE << SO true!!”
Siteroulette
Did you ever visit that site where you typed in a Google search and got the search the person before you had typed in? Kind of like that, but with URLs instead (filtered!), or youtube videos, or…
Beautiful Reddit
Take Reddit. Make it look nice. Similarly, Hacker News (which is beautiful in its elegance, but still, this is a design contest and I’d love to see what concepts people could come up with).
Paper on a Plane
I haven’t found a good implementation of this, though I’m looking. It definitely is relevant to my interests. Anyway, a good, Instapaper-esque but-using-HTML5-LocalStorage-probably, way of saving articles to read later – so when I’m on a plane, I can catch up on the longer, meatier stuff. And, one day, videos too. (A girl can dream.)
Presentation Mode
A conference-style presentation view of tweets, and possibly other social media mentions, of a keyword (conference hashtag) – ideally with some filtering, especially for repeats. Seen this done a lot, always ugly (even the one I built). App for monitoring audience Q&A via twitter on the same hashtag would be cool, too, e.g. with Google Moderator style voting.
Super Magic Awesome Boredom Eliminator 2000
This idea comes from “Hmm, what’s a nifty web API I could use that nobody else might be tapping”. UseĀ Directed Edge’s recommendations API andĀ Netflix’s dataset [or anyone's, really] plus some radical 1950s soapbox style design to create an app where users type in something they enjoy, and the Super Magic Awesome Boredom Eliminator 2000 tells them what they should watch/do next. Add user suggestions for extra sparkle.
Note: I spent an entire evening hacking around with the Facebook API to see if I could work some sorcery here to do with liking and friends and recommendations and stuff, but no dice. In case you were going to try.
URL! URL! URL!
A mix of the above, and siteroulette, with your own personal sprinkling of inspiration. Kind of like Alltop but basically reduced to a big shiny red button. Pick a category (heck – you could use Alltop to seed it). Voila – a constant URLfest of cool links within that category. Whether tweetmeme, personal twitter feed, the Technorati, or Reddit’s /img section seeds it – all you have to do is press play. Possibly better as a Chrome extension; possibly already exists as a Chrome extension. Oh well.
If you do implement any of these ideas, ever, give me a shout – I’m interested to see what turns up. Good sailin’ to ye.




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