Platewire sucks, calling all developers!

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Coding, Web

On July 20, 2006, I submitted the following idea to the Cambrian House community. I thought it was a good idea, but the community decided instead that there are more worthy projects. Now, the whole reason I signed up for Cambrian House is because I already know I have great ideas, but don’t have the time or money to act on them. CH suggests that they will take the ideas in as a community, and help you make a success out of them if you’re in a position like mine.
Here was my idea, submitted 7/20/06:

The Idea:
Implement an eBay-like feedback system for other drivers. The idea here is to make the person’s individual score an indicator of how considerate they’ve been, penalize those who aren’t, and publish their standings to the public.
Subject to abuse, so there would probably have to be some sort of normalizing mechanism where all your scores move one point towards zero every day or week. This would mean that you would have to be consistently good (or bad) to maintain any score.
You also would be able to look back and see historical monthly scores, to see if the person is consistantly bad or just had a bad month.
Also, the police would have the ability to see this ranking too, since it’s public knowledge. If someone was -50 in a week, they might take a closer look at addressing the issue.

I thought of this idea when I was…
While waiting in traffic, I watch people bypass the entire line of cars waiting to exit the highway and cut in front of everyone. Following closely behind are the people who just drive on the shoulder past everyone.
I’m looking for a way to promote driving courtesy. This is an embarrassment-based system, which usually works pretty well as a deterrent. Plus the fact that anyone (police, spouse, employer) can look up your plate #…that would be a fairly large deterrent as well…

…and what do you know, WIRED magazine posts this up in their RSS feed a few days ago:

Online service PlateWire lets motorists, pedestrians and cyclists keep tabs on the good, the bad and the ugly behind the wheel. In Autopia.

I went over to the platewire site, not believing my eyes. It’s a horrible implementation of my idea, but in surfing the founder’s blog, I found something more interesting: platewire.com launched on July 29, 2006… 9 days after I posted my idea. What’s worse is that the guy is on CNN and WIRED with this bag of crap.
Now, at first I was pissed, because I assumed some visionless hack stole my idea and implemented some junk site based loosely around it. I felt a little better when I noticed that the domain name had been registered in May.

Of the few ideas I’ve posted to Cambrian House, this is one of my favorites, and I hate to see it bastardized like this. I’ve got a whole lot of ideas about how to improve the service and make it workable and profitable… all I need is some help developing the site.

We’ve already seen the idea is good, I know how we can make it great. If you think you can handle making a clean, database-driven site (preferably with MySQL, CSS, PHP or Ruby), shoot me a message and let’s hop on this gravy train and blow platewire out of the water.

edit: I’ve had to close commenting, due to OT posting and spam.

Comments (2) | December 22nd, 2006

2 Responses to “Platewire sucks, calling all developers!”

  1. Mark Buckman Says:
    December 22, 2006 at 12:40 pm

    Although your opinion of our implementation being horrible, is not shared with the majority of our membership base, we do agree the site leaves a lot to be desired.
    PlateWire is not a bastardized version of your idea, it is our dream, and we made it happen, without funding, without a team, just the two of us. This is the first time I have seen this site, or “your” idea, and many other people have shared this idea as well. We we’re motivated by a personal experienece back in February of this year, and we launched May 11th.
    We welcome your competition, but at least respect what we have accomplished, we’re throwing a whole team of developers on PlateWire come January, so keep checking, we’ve got lots more to come :-)

  2. Nox Says:
    December 22, 2006 at 1:13 pm

    It’s frustrating when the community opts for something else (I often see my favourite come in second or third in IdeaWarz), but I hope it won’t discourage you from continuing to participate.

    One of the great things about the CH community is that you can use it to connect with others who want to work on your idea, and even if CH doesn’t get involved you may be able to pull together a development team or at least leverage the wisdom of the community to help you brainstorm and refine the idea to ensure it is as competitive as possible now that it is entering a marketplace where it isn’t entirely unique.

    Good luck!