--- layout: post title: It's Just Common Sense created: 1067313900 categories: - Social Media --- I was talking with my friend Jamie on the phone this evening. He had emailed earlier in the week, saying that he had some ideas that he wanted to run past me. It turns out that a lot of his thoughts mesh perfectly with current developments in social software. One was a reminder/scheduling service for salons and other appointment-based businesses, the other was a weather aggregator for flying conditions. The interesting part to me is that both of these ideas, right down to his general description of how they would work, is very much how these services are being built. Read on for pointers to some similar services. When common sense descriptions collide with how technology is actually enabling the implementation of services...isn't that something? I pointed him at Upcoming.org -- which does events, not reminders, but it's close -- which can perhaps serve as a model for how businesses could run reminder-type services. Both RSS feeds and email would be nice. By the way -- I've created an account for Upcoming. You can see my user page, plus there are pages for Ottawa and Vancouver. I'll be adding a link somewhere that points to the RSS feed of my events. Andrew has an account -- you should go sign up for one. I've just added an event listing for Animal Noises II, which will be the scene of the last Picklecatz show. For weather, I told Jamie about RSSWeather. It definitely isn't all there, but until we have a common XML/RDF format for weather AND good providers of that info, that's the best there is. Jamie described how the pilots at work spend perhaps 15 - 30 minutes quickly going through maybe a dozen sites to get a complete picture of the weather -- satellite images, radar, local reports, different reporting stations, etc. For the novice (perhaps someone at the local flying club this task would take considerably longer or perhaps even be impossible (they wouldn't necessarily know about the sites or how to interpret/combine all the data). Lastly, I brought up social networking sites, and told Jamie that I would send him an invitation to Tribe. I'm comfortable enough inviting people now, mainly because there are some good tribes like the Vancouver that are interesting enough that I check in about once or twice a week. If Tribes had RSS feeds to notify of new posts...that's it, they win.