Rational Exuberance

several paragraphs of ado before nothing:

this is possibly the third time i type this fuckr out:

the first was I think in some email to someone who will henceforth be known as “chad” several months back.

secondly i typed this out about an hour ago here and now in this blog TEXTAREA before I watched homestarrunner which was before i accidentally followed some tangent that one of my cohorts wanted me to follow — linkwise — that (my point:) led to my loosing of the contents of this web-form. (I curse the fact that wordpress doesn’t have gmail’s “autosave” feature. How hard can that be?)

so, the third and last time I will type this out is today:

One of my most heavily-respected colleges asked me off-the-cuff (or on-the-cuff?) if I have any business-ideas for a dot-com. I stammered a bit and said “Um…. i don’t know … let me check my blog.” (A sufficiently advanced blog may one day serve as a great crutch for early Alzheimer’s.)

He or she said something like “well, if you can’t think of anything off the top your head, it’s probably not worth bringing up here [in context that was taking place]”

So then afterwords I was all like “Damn … what was that good idea again?”

I skimmed over my previous (less than many) blog entires and realized I have not yet elucidated on my most prized brainchild — the most prized discovery I have yet to realize I didn’t make:

[And to create even further suspense before the grand exposition of what I know is the invitable future [yes i’ve been drinking]: My whole impetus for wanting to contribute to this blog that my brother so dutifully, dilligently and deftfully created was the fact that I am tired of having “ideas” (as they are called) that seem to either (a) blister in the sun like a dream deffered (or whatever) or (B) that I am tired of coming up with ideas that I find have already been “realized” well before I even “conceptualized” them, often by several years. So, this site [as I conceived it as being] was intended to serve as a digital paper-trail of this absurdity: both of the obvious-to-some naïve megalomaniacal ruminations we all frequently have (right?) (that prove to be a re-invention of some (often secret) wheel) and the occasional “damn-i-should’ve-done-this” flashes of fleeting brilliance. That’s what I wanted this site to be. Please pass the Johnnie Walker Black Label.]

My most prized brain-child (that i see feasible in my lifetime possibly by my own involvement) is this:

Imagine an ebay with a better search. The search is no longer a straight text-search on the arbitrary product-descriptions that vendors type-in freely, but rather it is a search against the unique structure of the data of type of products/services for which you are searching.

The search is simply: “This is what I am looking for (in no imprecise terms). Let me know when you find it.”

As it stands, for every product or service for which a customer searches, he or she has a “criteria” in her head that represents the target product that this customer seeks. Rarely does the application present tools that allow for the customer to express this critieria to a sufficient degree granularity that such that a search is immediately useful.

This is where I come in. Mark Meves.

(It sounds better if you pronouce it “Mavis.”)

…

Um… who farted?  oh, sorry.  that was me.
Does anybody remember BusinessObjects, circa 1998? This was the twilight of the era when software products were still marketed with MixedCaseNames, because that seemed LikeTheFuture. This app had a nifty query-builder tool (gui) which allowed you to create arbitrarily-deeply nested OR or AND branches to your SQL query. ( I didn’t realize these could be arbitrarily nested until I used this tool.) (The 2-D nature of this tool helped me visualize things I couldn’t easily see in the 1-D context of traditional hand-written SQL.)

Also BusinessObjects offererd the attractive feature of drag-and-drop, gui-based selection of field names and operators ( LIKE, =, IN ( ), <=, etc. ), so that, like any good UI, it was impossible for you to enter an invalid statement (or structure).

But I digress. What if you had an app that created UI elements (”controls”) to facilitate search in the manner that BusinessObjects presents UI elements to model searches for whatever unique schema of data? Because, after all, the search for a car is different than the search for a cell-phone than it is for the search for a therapist than it is for the search for an etc. (new drug? new girlfriend or boyfriend?)
Can we expect consumers to be able to figure out these obscure controls? Probably. If not, I bet we could make a trivial natural-language-esque interface on top of this that would facilitate such a consumer-vendor interaction in a manner that, while still seeming bot-like, would not seem any more venal and assinine than your average interaction with a sales-person.

And for the nay-sayers: You and I can all imagine the issues that this presents. (How do you get the schema? How do you allow for a data-store that dynamically morphs-on to the structure of arbitary new data? How do you validate the obviously biased incoming data from vendors? What is the basis for claiming that you have a basis for validating anyone’s information, in general? Why didn’t I become a furniture-designer, or shepherd, or dentist?)

These questions and more have probably already been answered by someone else. But if not, cheers to me!

And if so, I’m drinking anyway!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 4:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.