My friend Ben Copsey and I have been working on an idea for a web based business for a while now. That means I blah, Ben listens, says something sensible and then goes off to build another prototype. Very soon we will have something robust enough to test to see whether our idea appeals to more than a niche market of two. We, of course, are very excited by the idea, whether others will be equally excited has yet to be proved.
I take some encouragement because as we go on I can see links to some of the ideas that Vannevar Bush was developing in his thinking for his hypothetical machine the Memex , which I don’t think anyone else has fully developed and echoes of David Gelernter’s ideas about lifestreams, which, again, don’t seem to have been absorbed into mainstream thinking.
So very soon we shall see whether our ideas fall into the category of “seemed like a good idea at the time” or whether we have got something useful and desirable enough for people to want to pay to use. I’ll keep you posted.