And if you're failing to come up with any unique ideas for an app on your own, as a learning experience there's no shame in copying something else. It seems like many web developers try their hand at building their own blogging platform. Such an exercise should introduce you to a lot of the fundamentals of how a web application is put together. Or, pick a popular web app (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr), and try to replicate some of its features. Your app won't even come close to nailing down the whole set, and the things you implement will likely be buggy and inefficient versions of their professional counterparts, but if the point is just to learn I don't see why copying is a bad way to start. Many beginning artists learn technique by copying too. [citation needed (:]