Paper airplanes ✈️ and how Shazaam works!
Howdy, howdy!
I love talking about "app ideas". Or just ideas. It's like a fun game for me. I even enjoy it when non-technical folks tell me about an idea they have for some app or website that they wish existed.
I enjoy asking questions and digging into it.
And those situations very often lead to one of two directions:
- The idea would actually be simple to execute, but we just need the data.
- The idea would be simple to execute, but requires an existing critical mass.
The data
Someone was recently saying they were aware of airplane tracking apps (like the one this guy built for his toddler who loves airplanes)... but that they wanted one for tracking trains.
Like, I'm stopped at a train. My child wants to know: What's that train? Where did it come from? Where is it going?
The app itself isn't incredibly complicated to build.
But where do we get that information? Is there an existing service somewhere, or entity, from which we can get that data? Is it live? Is it stale?
Is there some very good reason it doesn't exist or isn't publicly available?
Who has it, and how would we get it are the hard parts.
Critical mass
"I want to create a new Twitter" - a site where anyone with an account can post short text messages.
Great! The X/Twitter functionality itself is actually pretty trivial. (Hand waving the scaling complexity of having millions of users for the moment. Please suspend your disbelief).
But twitter works now, because so many folks are there.
- Dating sites and apps need enough users in a geographic area to make matches
- Ride sharing services need drivers and riders for pickup times to be fast
- Q&A sites need experts to answer niche questions
Twitter grew slowly, and was something else entirely in it's early years.
Because it's not the idea. ;)
Links
- Wanna know how Shazaam works? That post from 2022 is a great guide. It's technical, but I think pretty approachable, and well explained.
- Need to win a paper-airplane contest? foldnfly.com has tons of (filterable!) instructions, and their "Runway" section has more than you ever wanted to know about making them.
- Robert Rouse is posting to a twitter thread daily to celebrate launching a site that collects visualizations of Bible data. Like maps, timelines, and other much more complicated-but-equally-interesting things. =)
- Have you seen Elle Cordova's "Fonts hanging out" video? (Alternate link). It's funny stuff, ~1.5 minutes.
Vague Updates
- I'm making some of my own "reaction GIFs". Tested a couple on some friends, and they were a hit. You will see more soon. ;)
Questions (for you!)
- Do you have app/product ideas you want to talk about? Let's geek out!
- What can you talk about for 25 minutes with zero preparation?