Facebook is now a ubiquitous social network utility, available practically on any device. It has a notion of status, which has more recently been adapted to encourage Twitter-like microblogging. It also has a notion of location, which can be applied to your own profile as a ‘home’ location, as well as events and pages such as those for pubs, stores and other venues. There is a huge number of logical entities defined with full metadata such as homepage, street address, contact number and so on. It could be the next world-wide Yellowpages (it would be great if they supported microformats to spread the machine-readable data). There are also services which run in-browser (sometimes with the help of a plug-in) and allow you to geo-position yourself based on your connecting network address or what WiFi radios are nearby (such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, Mozilla’s Geode and Skyhook’s Loki).

What is needed is a way of linking these up in order to enable wide-scale location-based services. When I pull up Facebook on my phone or computer, it should quite reasonably be able to tell where I am and show a list of nearby events, friends and locations without any user intervention. I should be able to optionally advertise that I am at a particular location, much like the way it works when you attend an event currently. Perhaps locations (such as pubs and cafes) could offer some kind of value-added services for patrons who advertise their location. For example, a free coffee refill, or link them with the location’s own web-based services, such as influencing the music queue, or seeing what events are planned.

Looking around at the cafe I am in right now (which indeed has its own Facebook page) I see Facebook screens flashing up on computers all over the place. Now is the time to take advantage of Facebook’s ubiquity and let these people find each other and connect with the location.

In Oslo, it’s not uncommon to see people walking around town with ski boots on as they head off skiing, Ski boots, be they cross-country, alpine, telemark or any other kind of nutty boutique boots they use here, are not really designed for walking on city streets, particularly icy and snowy streets.

Why the heck can’t we buy a little rubber booty or sock that slips on to the hard boot surface and provides some additional traction? Boots are hard and have a regular form, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to design something that could be slipped on and stays on securely.

Update May 1st: Looks like it has already been done: Walk-EZ

I used to have a Nikon Coolpix which had a feature called “best shot selector”. Choose that mode, fire off a burst of shots, and the camera only keeps the sharpest one. Why the heck is this feature missing on DSLRs? In Adobe Lightroom, why can’t I select a bunch of photos all of the same subject, and then choose ‘order by sharpness’ or something like that to pick the sharpest photos from a series?

It has been empirically shown that couples of similar attractiveness have a better chance of staying together. Why the heck isn’t there some kind of a dating site and Hot Or Not-style of mashup where you could browse a subset of members who were at or similar to your level of attractiveness?

To participate, you would have to rate a series of randomly-selected photos and a bunch of people would rate you. For ego sake, it might be best if aggregate attractiveness scores were kept hidden.

Last.fm knows all about my music likes and dislikes, why the heck can’t I subscribe to a feed to let me know when my favourite artists release new material? Or when some new hot band bursts on to the scene which a magic correlation engine thinks I’ll enjoy?

Sample MP3s, reviews and a link to buy could all be helpfully included in said feed.