When we first came up with the idea for IdeaPipe (no pun intended), we saw a need to fill a void in the social networking landscape. There are countless sites dedicated to connecting friends, classmates and business associates, sites that provide opinions and commentary around a specific topic and even sites that simply point to other sites, but there were few if any that enabled individuals or groups to share their ideas for the purposes of gathering feedback, collaborating or simply being heard.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
-Victor Hugo

For decades, corporations have relied on costly market research initiatives to gather opinions and insights as a means of measuring customer satisfaction and developing product road maps. Each day, we see politicians like Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain floating their ideas in the form of trial balloons only to wait on daily polls to determine voter’s reactions. By building upon this concept and giving everyone a voice, not just large corporations, we’ve created a platform that empowers individuals to have their ideas and opinions heard AND measured on everything from politics to their favorite products.

With your ideas, in concert with the collaboration of others, innovation will flourish. In fact, the world as we know it was built upon the unique ideas of individuals and it is exactly that which we hope to promote. Let’s face it… the solution to the energy crisis, global warming, and every other problem that plagues mankind, exists deep within the minds of individuals and it is our goal to assist in getting them out.

Ok, enough of the Mom and apple pie! IdeaPipe was created as a free service where individuals and/or groups can post their ideas on a variety of topics. Once posted, others will give your idea either a hype (i.e. “thumbs up”) or gripe (i.e. “thumbs down”) vote and optionally comment on the idea. For more specific information on how it works, visit our page on how it works! Sharing your ideas on IdeaPipe is a great way to:

• Gain valuable insight into how others perceive your ideas
• Meet and collaborate with other likeminded individuals
• Gain customer feedback
• Improve customer loyalty
• Impress your friends!

IdeaPipe is available to anyone who has a thought or idea. On top of that; within the coming few weeks, we’ll be rolling out new functionality that will enable you to even create your own public or private group. Individuals or companies large and small will even be able to create their own IdeaPipe and linked to it from, Facebook, MySpace or any other web site. And yes, we’re even going to eat our own dog food! Let us know what you think the future of IdeaPipe should look like by posting your ideas about what functionality you would like to see in the future!

So create an account and get started today. Time is wasting to get your ideas heard.

A couple of weeks ago I posed about the Anything For Sale By Owner Website that I lead the development effort in. Well coming this Thursday (2007-10-25) we are going to be having a huge event in Times Square launching the website. Come out and join in, we are going to be giving away T-Shirts, doing interviews of what you would do with an extra dollar in your pocket, and a bunch of other events through out the day. I have included the Times Square ad that will be running on the Reuters building.

As I alluded in a post a couple of weeks ago, I have been a bad blogger. And I have neglected my community of readers. However I would like to tell you what I have been doing in the last couple of months while I have been neglecting my blog.

I recently got involved in creating a startup as the lead developer for an online classifieds site called Anything For Sale By Owner. From the ground up this was conceived as a middle-ground between craigslist and ebay where every listing would be charged at a static rate of $1.00/month. The $1.00 is a way to week out the crap from craigslist and the death-by-fees from ebay.

The description is pretty straight forward but the more interesting tid-bits that I know my readers are interested in are as follows:

.NET/C#

We choose .NET mostly because it is what I knew and .NET for me has always been stable, predictable, and performed really well on server-side applications. The alternative was PHP and even through we wrote many of the processing layers by our self (i.e. REST Web Service Handler) the time to deployment was greatly accelerated because of all the work the Microsoft ASP.NET Team has put in to the product. The user of Master Pages and Web Services made for an easy separation between content and display.

MySQL

We choose MySQL for a whole host of reasons mostly based around the costs associated with a single Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition license. Other reasons we choose MySQL was for scalability, because not only could we install 5 database servers (hardware included) for the same price we could purchase 1 MSSQL database server for but also because the master/slave replication of the databases seemed to be an easier process when we needed to scale horizontally.

REST Web Services/AJAX

We followed the Digg Model for exposing web services and each web service could be changed around to provide output through JSON, RSS, ATOM, KML (where applicable), and XML. I even did a write up about a month ago on the JSON Serializer that I developed for this website. This was very important for the AJAX we needed to control many aspects of the user experience.

Open Search

Open search was one of the value add features that wasn’t in the original spec but was an easy add-on because we already had the Web Services in place to leverage. You can view our open search XML definition file here. If you are unfamiliar with Open Search this is how A9.com defines it:

OpenSearch is a set of simple formats for the sharing of search results. Any website that has a search feature can make their results available in OpenSearch format. Other tools can then read those search results.

So that little search box in the upper right hand corner of your browser is an example of an Open Search client.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a very important part of any website today. Because for most new sites and even some of the older ones, Google is going to be the largest most ignored user of the site. Not only will Google look at every single page on your site every week, which I dare any human to try and accomplish, they will also be the largest organic promoter of your site.

One of the corner stones of SEO is easily readable URL’s that contain descriptive keywords. This means you have to have a good URL Rewriter in place. We choose Ionic’s ISAPI Rewriter that integrated nicely with IIS 6.0. However that left a big gap between using Visual Studio’s Intigrated Web Server (which doesn’t support ISAPI) and a full blown IIS Server. The benifits are pretty obvious for running the Intigrated Web Server that comes with Visual Studio, for one you don’t always have to have IIS that comes with Windows XP always running and the host of security problems that comes with it, two I was running Windows Vista and IIS 7.0 has some huge differences from IIS 6.0.

So I sat down one night and wrote my own Apache mod_rewrite compatible HttpModule for running the same rule-set that I defined for Ionic’s ISAPI Rewriter, to fill in the gap and make developing on my local machine as close as running the live web site on IIS 6.0.

If anybody is interested I offer the Url Rrewriter as a free download:

• Download – Managed Fusion Url Rewriter

Front End Design

I am a software developer and usually don’t get invovled in the artsy end of the web site design. So I will let my co-worker Tom Lauck describe how he developed the front-end for Anything For Sale By Owner.

So all in all I believe that this website has a very good chance of making in the Wild Wild West that the Internet is, however that is probably just the ramblings of a proud father. Be on the look out for some major marketing campaigns in the NYC Times Square region.