Me and a friend have been toying with the idea of how cool it would be to start this little micro-ISV thing on the side. Not something that would take a lot of time, or generate any big bucks (right away at least), but something that could have a little potential and be fun to work on in our spare time.

We have been trying to find some great idea for this project, but it's a lot harder than we thought. We've been through quite a bit, but they all fell apart after a little bit of research, or just from applying common sense.

What we want is some product that can mostly just keep running by itself, and it will generate some ad-based income from the traffic alone - or perhaps by subscriptions. All we'd have to do is get the service up and running, and keep it running. Of course, we'd be adding stuff and fixing bugs, but that would be at our own pace - whenever we have time. And it wouldn't have to be an original idea, It could just as well be to take someone else's thing that we think sucks, and make it better.

Looking for ideas, we noticed how sucky Friendster's technical solution is, and figured we could do better. That was until we checked out MySpace (and plenty others) and saw that their thing really works well. We have no edge to compete on, so we dropped it. Then we figured we'd focus on just picture galleries instead of profile pages, but keep the social aspects. Then Flickr came to mind, and we dropped that too.

Online Office applications are also done. No good, and too much work.

Then we resorted to brainstorming - turning off the output filter on the brain and just letting everything run wild. And I must say, that stuff really works once you get into it. Though, it's of no use. Because all we got was the stuff that we should have been filtering out anyway.

Here are some of the "bright ideas" that came out loud when the filter was off:

• WebZip. This would be the online replacement for WinZip. You'd need no installation to use it. You just open a web page whenever you want to zip something. It works by letting you upload a large file that you want to compress, and then you get to download the compressed file.
  
  
• Offline email. This service lets you send emails to someone who doesn't have an email account, or even an internet connection. We'd just print the email on paper and send it by post. Upon retting the written reply, we'd scan it, OCR it, and email it back.
  
  
• Realtime IQ. A website where you would write everything that is on your mind all the time, and it would tell you how smart you are as your IQ value, in realtime.
  
  
• Content Matchmaker. A matchmaking website that scans your whole harddisk to see what stuff you have, and then find other people who have much of the same stuff.
  
  
• Knowledge is power. A website where you write everything you know, and it tells you everything that you don't know, so you can learn. As a lot of people do this our database becomes a vast repository of all human knowlege. We'd know who knows what, and even better, who doesn't know certain things. We could scam people into giving us money by lying about the things we know they dont know.
  

So we stopped the brainstorming.

And we're still stuck on coming up with that grand get-rich-easily scheme. There must be some way.