A while ago, I had an idea for a website. It would be a kind of calendar site and tracker for men to keep tabs on their wives and girlfriends’ menstrual cycles. There are lots of these sites for women, but I couldn’t find any targeted at men.
In my very ad hoc survey, I found that most men had little or no idea about their partner’s cycles. The site wouldn’t specifically be aimed at getting notified about their partner’s PMS, but was more designed as a holistic heads-up. Men could use it as they saw fit. Presumably users would get email alerts or sync the information to their own digital calendars. I would take pains to make it as lighthearted as possible. I even had a good name: HerAuntFlo.com.
It wasn’t a very good idea, though, as I got a negative reaction from most people I talked to about it. No matter how I positioned it in conversation, it sounded kind of sexist to a number of women. So, like 90% of my ideas, I dropped it.
Today, Gillian sent me a link to PMSBuddy. It’s pretty much exactly what I describe, though it’s specifically targeted at the PMS-wary (or weary, I suppose) among us. The site’s slogan is “saving relationships, one month at a time”.
I’m kind of on two minds on the execution. On the one hand, I do think there’s a little value in the service. After all, it could theoretically help men behave more sensitively. On the other hand, is it fundamentally sexist?
Maybe the sexism lies in the male user’s reasons for signing up?
They are now eons beyond Gmaps because while Gmaps will show you the google satellites and topography maps, MapMyRide will show me google’s new terrain maps which I much prefer! And they even show me the elevation of my intended (or already executed) ride, per feet and per miles! And you can change it to kilometers if you like. And it’s awesome. Did I mention that?
I like the concept. I’ve been logging a few of my recent, short, errand-filled rides around town. They also provide a way to search for recommended cycling routes. The site is clearly designed for more aspirational athletes, but I enjoy plotting my bike rides on the Google Maps-powered interface when I get home.
Speaking of interface, MapMyRide could use the attention of a serious interaction designer. The site is so crammed with menus, features and advertising–it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I always have difficulty finding what I’m looking for. Which is too bad, because the underlying functionality seems robust.
Here’s my useless idea of the day. What if we could watch live or recorded screencasts of a writer’s screen as they write? The writer–from Stephen King to your favourite local blogger–installs some software on their computer, and it broadcasts the activity in their word processor (or authoring tool of choice) in real time to the web.
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of Victor Hugo:
It kind of combines Webex and RobotReplay with the popular notion of radical transparency. It sounds banal, but so does Twitter, and people seem to like that.
The technology for this obviously already exists. There’d be a little work in building plugins for MS Word, NotePad,browser forms and whatever else people write in. But other than that it would be simple.
If you’re Stephen King, maybe you offer some kind of premium subscription that enables people to spy on your writing. Hardcore fans, knowing that King usually writes in the morning, would log in to watch him putter away on his latest novel.
Of course, no writer that I know would permit this. As the saying goes, “there are two things you never want to see made, sausage and legislation”. I’d add most forms of writing to that list.
We’re driving in the last foothills before the Sahara Desert starts in earnest. We were on this twisty stretch of asphalt only wide enough for one car. You had to pull onto the gravel shoulder to let the very occasional oncoming vehicle–mostly trucks and the old beige Mercedes that are the region’s taxis–pass you by.
As I sometimes do, I wondered if this was the first time that song had ever been played over this particular piece of terrain. Had anybody ever driven these 5.25 kilometres while John K. Samson sang:
Depluralize our casualties, drown the generals out in static
We turn and watch our city sprawl and send us signals in the glow
Of night windows
And then I thought about how most phones are also music players, and about the increasing appearance of GPS in mobile devices. And then I imagined a web service like Flickr’s maps.
Instead of recording where photos were taken, this service would capture where songs were played. And because songs happen in time, instead of captured moments, the site would display the paths that that music took over the Earth. Here’s how that might look:
You could build musical maps of trips, events or your entire life. This is a kind of a 21st variation on the songlines of Australian aboriginals (see also Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book).
This seems like a natural add-on for Last.fm or a similar music social network. Maybe somebody has already done this?
Last week, somewhere, I read about Commentful, a service that enables you to monitor blog posts for new comments. This comes in handy because I probably leave five comments a day on other people’s blogs, and if I want to see follow-ups, I either have to leave the windows open, or remember to check back. With its lightweight Firefox plug-in, Commentful seems to be solving this problem:
Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr pictures, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, such as a new follow-up or comment, Commentful notifies you instantly.
It’s not exactly feature-rich at the moment, but it does what it says on the box. On someone’s recommendation, I’d tried coComment about six months ago, but I had some technical issues with it (something about Flickr integration, if I recall correctly). coComment certainly does more than Commentful, but I’ll stick with the latter for the time being.
