Ask HN. Torn between two ideas.

[teamplaya]

I have funding and a group of individual to work with. I have two ideas, 1. A calendar app 2. Social bookmarking Both with a simple and minimal look and feel. iOS/Android app and web app. I don't know which to choose to develop, they both really excite us. What would you choose. 1 or 2 ?

[DanBC]

I'm not sure how you could make social bookmarking different enough from existing products to be interesting and useful. One idea would be to have topics to which people suggest links; no one person owns any board or topic. That means that if I want any information about chairs I go to the chairs topic, and there they all are. i don't have to follow eight different people who have a chairs board and who may be posting similar links. Add in some kind of voting and you then have a directory of trusted (but, obviously, it's exploitable) links.

Calendars and diaries could be made useful. There are a huge number of very similar calendaring / diary softwares, and they all have similar limited functionality. I'd want something that made it really really easy to add stuff to; when someone emails me I want to be able to select and right-click some text and have that parsed and added to a calendar. I don't need to break my days into 15 minute segments. I want to be able to view the next week, or month, or whatever, per page.

[m_marker]

Regarding the Social bookmarking app, we want to take a recommendation system appoach, so we set the boards, and as new content gets posted, we fetch the content on the content recommendation engine we post it to a particular board. Users can then suscribe to boards and get content in realtime. A user can either vote up/down the content and we coulde use it to train and get the user preference.

[weeny]

have you ever seen this site: reddit.com

[teamplaya]

Yes, but reddit doesn't have a live recommendation system? The posts are ranked based on user votes

[weeny]

It's fundamentally a live recommendation system, and those votes make it work better than anything else (see Digg). I click on a subreddit and I get recommendations for related pages.

[alexobenauer]

I think the calendar space isn't nearly as flooded as social bookmarking.

The most interesting proponent I've seen in the calendar space is [TouchBase](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchbase-calendar-1-touch/id...).

I haven't seen a social bookmarking proponent that I really liked, and something like Instagram for links would be really interesting. I say this because it's not a social sharing app that blasts everything you do out to your entire social network on facebook (unless you set it to), and you don't automatically follow every one of your friends that's on Instagram. That's really nice, because the apps that make those assumptions are immediately filled with garbage from those with whom I have not interacted in years.

I'm sure you already have your ideas, but I figured I'd throw this out there for you to add to your melting pot of responses.

[adamtaa]

Actually, I have an alpha social bookmarking product that is something like this. The home page is crap and I am in the midst of something else so I can get to it for a week. but it has the features you mention. I have been keeping it under wraps but if you want to crawl around in it for fun its located at www.markmyplace.com. feedback appreciated.

[teamplaya]

Thanks a lot for your response. The social bookmarking app that we are think of mainly addresses the issue of noise. We are envisioning a closed network for sharing content.

[AznHisoka]

I'd choose neither. I either build something that businesses would buy, or something that would attracts lots and lots of users in a non-saturated market so I can sell advertising. None of those 2 fits the bill.

[tzaman]

You really shouldn't "think" which one is better here. Do your homework, analyze the market, do the math and let the numbers tell you which one is the better pick.

[brudgers]

The calendar, like email, could stand replacement/reinvention.

I don't know what I would do with a social bookmarking app (but I'm not all that hip).

[weeny]

Why not both?

[hboon]

At the same time? Focus and time is limited.

[weeny]

No, combine the two played ideas into one novel idea. It's called synthesis, thats what constitutes innovation...

[teamplaya]

Don't you think it would be better to focus on one, get it working really well then we can expand. All these companies started with a small focused idea

[weeny]

I'm talking about one focused idea. I dont want to do your homework for you guys but think "temporal social bookmarking" - social bookmarking and calendar app have a baby. Otherwise you're just rehashing Google Calendar and/or Digg.