Wat we can do!

Haha dun have to stay tuned for long, I broke it up into two posts juz so that the comments can be more focused. Here's some mentalities that we can capture:

1. Pple who wanna communicate realtime with other pple by geographical locations. Let me explain this. Tonic pls correct me if I'm wrong. For eg I wanna noe more abt Greenwich Village New York, so I can log on n chat with pple staying in Greenwich Village to ask them realtime abt the weather there, political stability, where's gd food n music etc. Time zone difference is a prob here though, coz most likely S'poreans n Americans wun be free at the same tum. 

2. Pple who wanna preview the world, with their butts stuck on the chair. Essentially the internet is already such a tool but the prob with the internet is you can onli roam the world by keywords (eg. gd restaurants in London, art galleries in Shanghai). N in order to "visit" many places u gotta go to many websites n open many windows, by the tum which ur internet browser will be cluttered with tabs. 

Wat we can do is let pple roam the world, again by geographical locations. Imagine I wanna roam London, I can drag, scroll, zoom in zoom out an interactive map of London accurate to the street n shop level. Then I can "walk into" every shop by clicking on it n all info abt the shop (food menu, events, promotions, photos etc) will appear on a new page. When I'm done, I can juz "walk out" of the shop by closing the page n go back to the map. So u can roam the world in one website - ours. What's impt is all these info will be provided by the shop owners themselves n they will design their own pages. Every shop will wanna do this coz if u dun, it's like closing ur shop on a wkend when every other shop in the same area is open. 

Sorry for the long post but it's hard to explain in a few sentences. Now tum to talk abt money. I think this is gonna be an ambitious project. I've found out that big successful projects like facebook, MySpace, google etc all had millions of dollars of funding from Venture Capitalists, pple who give u the money simply coz they believe in ur idea making more money for them. I guess that's the direction we gotta head towards. Comments time!        

Summary

Here's the summary of wat me n tonic discussed on Sun. Firstly, we discussed wat are the mentalities of pple using facebook in order to understand wat OTHER mentalities we can capture to have an edge.  Pls add on to the list if u can. Here they are:

1. Network with pple in the same company (esp. int'l colleagues for MNCs)

2. Noe pple with common interests

3. Keep in touch with old frens

4. Organize activities (eg. political rallies)

5 . Broadcasting yourself, similar to blogs with self-made celebrities like Mr Brown n xiaxue

6. Buying n selling stuff

7. Marketing ur own works (eg. music, poetry, graphics), this one applies more to myspace.com

8. Simply to kill boredom

9. Gd interface design - draggable, easily customizable homepage (this is not exactly a mentality but a reason y facebook is so popular)

Ok here's lamn alot that they have covered, so wat the f*** can we do?!

Stay tuned to find out more...

website? forums?

i guess if you want people to contribute.. then u might need a server to store the data if there are any post. If we are testing the idea perhaps we can start a forum since it allows posting of comments and pictures. Ive done a search and there are sites offering free setups of forums. If the forum is good (response) then we can start thinking of getting a professsional to do the website for us as Gab says. What say u guys? If its ok then the next line of discussion would be waht to include in the forum.

Consensus?

So have we done enuff homework n are sure that the idea is worth investing in? If yes, I think maybe we can start by setting up a simple website without stuff like servers yet. Juz to start to let the "insiders" start contributing with text or maybe photos. If the response is gd then we'll think of the next step. If not, at least we can review what went wrong before we invest too much. 

As a note to the nature of this collaboration, my view is that we shldn't expect it to fly too quickly as the past few wks have shown, none of us can really commit alot of tum to it. High expectations might result in disappointment and the project will be abandoned soon. Instead, I think that since it's an online project thus most actions can be done online (discussions, research or even getting the actual website going), we just return to check this blog once every two days for an update and do watever actions to push the project slowly. What do u guys think? 

Anw I have invited u all to publish posts through emails. So pls check ur emails n start posting!

Another one!

Here's another one! http://www.europe-travelers.eu/About-us This one for European destinations onli but use Google Maps such that for a location on the map there's a photo and video introduction.

Existing travel sites

So far I've onli found one open source online travel guide which is the www.world66.com. Very informative but texty. Cannot share videos but got shared photo gallery. Not very strong sense of identity I feel. Also it's all the travellers' comments not the insiders. U all found any?