I registered a domain name today: (dearpeeps.com, dearpeeps.net, dearpeeps.info & dearpeeps.org) for an idea… The idea came to me this morning on the bus.
Idea:
Where could you go if you want to ask a question about something that you’d feel like sounding out a friend about? You could go to a particular forum, you could maybe go to a craigslist discussion, or a google or yahoo discussion… but each of those choices involves going to a part of a bigger whole – and a fair amount of people wouldn’t even know that they all exist…
A dedicated site just for asking and getting opinions could be good…
So I thought of “Dear peeps” as in dear people… a site where you can go and register and ask and answer questions posed by people.
The kind of questions I’m thinking of are more LTUAE than “how can I get more mileage from my toyota corolla”…
The site will kind of operate:
- Similar to digg in that questions asked can be voted up and down by the site’s community, thereby raising up or down on the list of questions, which would be broken down into categories… Answers too would also be voted up/down.
- Similar also to answers.yahoo but whereas that site is more based on asking a question once and then grading the questions, dearpeeps would allow conversations to occur… like threaded discussions… if that is the way the asker wants to go.
- The site would also borrow a fair bit from the stakoverflow.com way of asking and grading questions…
People using the site would have profiles on there and integration options into twitter, facebook, google, live, flickr etc
The site would include google or microsoft ads for revenue but be otherwise free…
Any immediate comments?
Some comments I’ve received already:
ScottH: Sounds like Quora or FormSpring
CaseyV: You got an email from ScottH!
TerenceT: Some thoughts:
- It should start as simple. Maybe not as simple as Quick, Say Something Nice. But with the same small and clear focus.
- Deep integration into an Already Popular Service™. Not just a little “like” or “tweet this” button. For example, each new question gets a random hashtag, e.g. #dearpeeps-93821. Then anyone with twitter can join the conversation, without even signing up (or even visiting the site)
- I like the Facebook concept of polls that anyone can suggest new items for.
TheresaO: Cool, good idea… people love to get people’s opinions and it could be fun too.
TerenceT:
Just an example of something that’s small and useful. (That’s web 2.0, don’t you know.)
Another example: www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com
Telstra finally got their act together and got an update out. Unfortunately it hasn’t done much to alleviate the woeful lack of responsiveness for my HTC Mozart so it will now have to go back to HTC for a makeover…
Performance of the update is shown below using WP Bench:
Seen on Gamasutra, Beyond Facade: Pattern Matching for Natural Language Applications by Bruce Wilcox. Discusses the relatively convoluted scheme employed with AIML and it’s broad brush pattern matching approach and compares it to Facade’s approach of assembling facts and matching those to discourse acts with the use or OR and NOT for word matching, over AIML’s basic AND. The article then moves on to discuss the author’s own AI script language called Chatscript and it’s superior differentiation from AIML and Facade.
Links from the article:
Could this be the long awaited copy and paste update? Yeah! No 
Nope… it looks like the update to 7.0.7390 will be some time yet. This update took the phone to 7.0.7008 and is presumably the pre NODO update.
I ran WP Bench before and after updating the phone and good these result (photo’s courtesy of wife’s iPhone 3 GS)…
| Before update | After update |
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Daniel Vaughan (not Daniel Vaughan or Daniel Vaughan) and Katka Vaughan have created Surfy, a free tabbed web browser for Windows Phone 7. It sports tabbed browsing, full screen view, orientation locking and search in the address bar while entering text, to name a few features. Well worth checking out 
.