TWQ: Social Media Prophylactic

This Week's Quandary: "There should be an app for distraction. I need something to whoop my butt into shape and ignore all social media. Someone invent this! Go!" Posted by @lacretia 

1. Eric L. says, "I understand there's software, maybe not an app though, that will monitor how much time you spend using various programs. It's built for freelancers so they know how much to charge for an hourly wage-based project. Anyway if there were something similar that monitored the number of hours you spend on facebook and twitter, and then automatically just logged you off and shut you out once you reach a predetermined time that the user might set in the preferences or something."

Thanks to Eric L. for his suggestion to This Week's Quandary! If you have a suggestion of your own submit it on our Facebook or Twitter page and we'll post it here!

The Karma Index

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UPDATE: We've set about this project with hopes of making the world a better place. If you're a developer that'd like to collaborate or a rich investor with a big heart please email me directly: donald-at-thekarmalist-dot-org For more information please see: http://www.udjinteractive.com/blog/new-nonprofit-project-the-karma-list.html Thank you for the overwhelming support!

There should be an online community for people who do extraordinary acts of kindess or heroism. A place for people to recognize and share karma.

Here's how it works: Someone does something out of the ordinary so to thank them the receiver of the act of kindess adds the person to the The Karma Index. The list keeps track of the person's acts of kindness.

Rules:A person cannot add themselves or their acts. To add an act of kindness you must be added by someone else.

Other stuff: There could be a simple and an advanced addition system. Simple would just increase the person's karma number and the advanced would allow a text for a personal message. Both, simple and advanced, can be added anonymously. (or possibly everything is anonymous) The number of timesa person adds an act of kindness will also be collected. A badge system could be added to the person's website or blog and could be connected to their social networks.

Notes: simple simple simple This website has to be very very simple or users wont take the time to do it. Profile page is simply a pic, person's name, their karma badge and a tread of personal messages (maybe). This will have the opposite effect of the narcissistic nature of the facebook.

What's going on? Show me!

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There is probably something like this out there already in one form or another. The idea is to scrape twitter for tweets concerning recent events like concerts, bar tours, 5/10K runs, film festivals, etc. The system will take the geolocation of each tweet and then find photos related to those events on sites like PicasaWeb, Flikr, Photobucket, etc.

The system will be able to figure out what photos are associated with what event by finding information on the event, and most importantly, the date and associating that with the datestamps on the photos.

What you'd get is a map and a timeline where events are marked and photos are displayed. The idea could also be expanded to show, for example the history of particular landmark like the Statue of Liberty. At least, as far back as we have had geo-tagged photos on digital cameras.

Online Resume

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The idea: An online resume system that scrapes your social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. to get data revenant to where you have worked. This way, your resume is built automatically. Taking the idea further, your places of employment could be visualized on a map. Your jobs could be visualized on a timeline to show details about how long you've worked at a particular place, etc. Your old references would be linked to by their social networks as well so potential employers could easily find them and talk to them.

Interesting things could be done with this depending on the type of profession of the individual. For example, a photographer could have their free-lance work accessed by location on the map or on the timeline. Links from the map or timeline could take a potential employer to a gallery of images taken at that job.