(On a side note: I witnessed one of these calls. It makes you feel really uncomfortable. If you want to see how criminals are treated, get your eBay account suspended and then call them to ask why. Just know that you will never be able to be an eBay user again)

My idea revolves around verifying that the person is real and “innocent.” Much like the American system of financial credit score, using a person’s email address, one service will be able to trigger an “online identity score” check with other services that user is registered to.

For example, let’s say I’m registering to eBay. During the registration process I give my Gmail address, which I also use for Facebook. With my consent, eBay will be able to query Google and Facebook and ask them about how genuine my account is, so as to verify both that I’m a real person and that my account hasn’t been hacked (both Gmail and Facebook already have fake account and anti-hacking protections.)

What is it good for? With all the connectivity among people and now that every website has “social” features, there’s no way for a simple “message in a bottle” kind of a gesture in today’s Internet.

Like I said… old school.

Here’s a quote of the proposed solution from the article. The 8 readers of this blog may find it familiar :)

Finally, I hit on a simple solution: I’d split the passphrase in two, and give half of it to my wife, and the other half to my parents’ lawyer in Toronto. The lawyer is out of reach of a British court order, and my wife’s half of the passphrase is useless without the lawyer’s half (and she’s out of reach of a Canadian court order). If a situation arises that demands that my lawyer get his half to my wife, he can dictate it over the phone, or encrypt it with her public key and email it to her, or just fly to London and give it to her.

As simple as this solution is, it leaves a few loose ends: first, what does my wife do to safeguard her half of the key should she perish with me? The answer is to entrust it to a second attorney in the UK (I can return the favour by sending her key to my lawyer in Toronto). Next, how do I transmit the key to the lawyer? I’ve opted for a written sheet of instructions, including the key, that I will print on my next visit to Canada and physically deliver to the lawyer.

P.S.
Thanks to blog reader rom for pointing the story out to me.

So when I die, I want someone to patch things up with everyone – my blog should be properly shut down, my Facebook status would be “Amit Schreiber is dead” and an auto-reply email will be sent to everyone who tries to mail me (also – take me off mailing lists so that my mailbox won’t be filled up with them.) Not to mention handling my bank accounts and stuff like that.

All these require a person, who I trust, to handle. But I don’t want this person to have access to all my accounts right now. Only when I die. Which brings us to the basic usage scenario of my new website idea:

1. Give an encrypted file to the website containing all the information you want someone to have when you die. Also, provide details of the person you trust (email address, basically.)
2. Give the trusted person the instructions on how to open the file when he/she gets it.
3. Die (how’s that for a sales pitch?)
4. The person will request the file from the website. A notification email will be sent out to you to allow you to block the transfer in case you’re not really dead and the so-called trusted person is trying to get the file.
5. Once a predefined period of time passed and you haven’t blocked the transfer, the website assumes you’re dead and sends the encrypted file to the trusted person.

This system keeps everyone honest: the website can’t do anything with an encrypted file and the trusted person can’t steel the file because you get notified about it (so you can block the transfer.) All that so you can die happily knowing your online presence is in good hands.

At first I told about it to just a few friends, most don’t think it’s useful because not too many people plan in advance for their deaths. That’s why I call the users of the website a niche market. I don’t exactly expect them to return either, if you know what I mean :) But then came this Slashdot article that states “A wave of new companies are springing up to offer such things as virtual cemeteries, alerts to remind loved ones about the anniversary of your death, and even email services that send an alert to your sinful relatives in danger of being left behind when the Rapture carries you away.” So now I want to implement it.

The same content will be sent to multiple users, so that the system will not be easily gamed by people that are paid to create spam. If there’s a user that keeps marking almost everything as “not spam” he/she will be kicked out of the system (or even given data that is surely spam to test if we maybe have an “evil” bot.)

Hopefully we’re only talking about the “maybe spam” that was returned from an automatic spam filter, like Akismet. This will reduce the number of messages to check greatly. Regardless, this kind of system can only work if the number of “good” users exceeds by far the number of “evil” users, but since everyone hates spam and it’s a minimal effort I believe enough people will join in. Search engines can use this system to test if a fresh new blog is just a spam blog or a real one.

Unfortunately this will not work for any type of private communication, like email, simply because email is private and you can’t let other people see it.

So, do you think it’s a good idea, or did I miss an obvious way to game this Human Anti Spam system? If it’s good, maybe I’ll send it to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th.

Let’s further assume that this cache isn’t local on the computer requiring the result. If that’s the case, accessing the cache to even find out if the result of your problem exists costs you quite a lot and you have to consider whether it’ll be worth your while to try and access the cache, get a cache miss and compute the result yourself. Considering the amount of storage required to store everything and the time it would take to send the problem set, access the data and send the results back, most problems aren’t good candidates for such a universal cache. Today.

However, storage space is becoming cheaper and network speed is constantly rising, so more and more problems will benefit from a universal cache service like that. Creating such a service isn’t too hard. It can be implemented, as an example, using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) for results storage. The universal cache can be self learning – for example, if there is a high percentage of cache misses, enlarge cache storage space automatically. In addition, you can use Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) for computing the cache misses instead of performing the calculations yourself. So in the case of high percentage of cache misses, you may choose to add more computers to the grid.

For example, in my Google Reader account I have a gadgets folder that contains both feeds from Gizmodo and Engadget. I never manage to follow even one of those feeds, but sometimes I check them out to see what’s new in the gadget world. Each of these competing blogs has its own merits that make me keep it in my RSS reading list. However, I would like to see similar news items grouped into one, much like what Google News does with news items.

I went to offer this feature to Google and naturally I’m not the first person to do that. The funny thing is that the guy who suggested the feature even used the Gizmodo/Engadget example himself.

While this may be considered a good effect of cellphone adoption (I’m not always sure it’s good, but I digress), cellphones can be very intrusive. If you’re in a meeting, watching a movie or sleeping – people can get to you any time. If you don’t want to be interrupted you can always silence the phone or turn it off. Still, I need a mode in between – a mode that, if someone calls once, doesn’t light up, vibrate or ring unless the same person calls again immediately – then the phone should come back to life and do whatever the current mode instructs it to do (ring, vibrate, whatever).

Currently I “emulate” this when I’m in meetings. If a call comes in and I think the person may need me right now I send back an SMS saying “call again if urgent”. This can be part of the implementation of the call-again-if-urgent mode. I wonder if current smartphone software allows such control and if it can be implemented today. The best thing would be if the network supported it and so, assuming you urgently need someone, your cellphone will tell you that the callee set the call-again-if-urgent mode and ask you if you would like to bother him/her.

Facebook, on the other hand, gives users as much stuff to tinker with as they can handle. Considered a genius move, Facebook creators opened the site by providing an application API that can be used to create “Facebook applications.” There is a huge amount of applications, from gift-giving to playlist display and whatnot. You can post images, videos, thoughts and anything you can think of on Facebook.

There’s a lot of hype around Facebook with regards to the applications. However, the applications thing can be a little annoying. Let’s say a friend posted a song that can be listened to on his profile page. To listen to that song, I have to install the application on my profile as well. Why? I have no idea. I guess either that’s an enforcement of Facebook itself, or application makers are in a race to virally spread their applications to get better numbers in the overall application installation statistics. This kind of behavior makes me not want to use the website.

Recently, Google announced OpenSocial, a way to build social networks applications in a way that is independent of a website. While the OpenSocial group includes MySpace (the biggest, yet ugliest, social network that exists today), it doesn’t include Facebook. That’s a shame for application developers, considering that Facebook is rapidly growing and appears to have a better application delivery/installation mechanism than other websites.

Assuming I have an idea for a social network application, a few questions are bothering me:

1. What kind of a business model can you have in an application that is hosted on another website? I’m guessing there is such a model or otherwise there wouldn’t be companies investing efforts in creating such applications.
2. Should I create the application in Facebook? As an OpenSocial application? Both? Maybe I should create an independent website and hook it up to the social networks later?

Update: After writing this post I went to see a video that discusses the possibilities of monetizing on the Facebook platform in addition to the problems that Facebook application developers face today and why they simply have no choice but to make users install their applications to get recognition by more users.