You know what would be SO cool? If you could complain in your public lifestream (twitter, facebook, google buzz, whatever) about a problem you were having with a company, and get an automatic reply telling you how to fix it. So there's a web crawler that looks for references and parses them, and companies subscribe to a feed of their mentions and provide responses for the FAQ, and an automated response gets sent to whoever complained. This would save people so much time. I'll give you a couple of examples: #helpmefixit! the rubber rotor melted on my kitchenaid blender, tell me where to buy a new one! or #helpmefixit! Where can I recycle old computers near 10026? I know this kind of help happens informally from people on Twitter all the time, but I want the companies to see the volume of complaints about certain things so they know which areas to focus on, so this needs to be automated. Anyone working on this?

Comments

[arthur einstein]

Good idea Iz. Real problem I'd anticipate is how to describe the problem. The big issue I have searching on line is describing what I'm looking for. It's not trivial. I had agonies with my first spreadsheet before I learned from a friend that adding a column required the command "sum" and not "add" - silly me.

[Sam]

Speaking of lifestreams -- it's hard to subscribe to your feed if you don't give headlines to your posts, because then the newsreader doesn't know what to display as the link. At least, it confuses Google....

[Iz]

Arthur - I agree that knowing the right keywords is a key (yeah, I know) part of doing Internet research. It can be hard coming up with them if you don't know the topic well enough to know the lingo other people use. Frustrating! And Sam - you're right, this is a flaw with Typepad, they advertise this quick post feature that is supposed to compete with Twitter, and I was using it, but perhaps they haven't thought it through 100%. Maybe I should stop.