There are so many times when I wake up in the morning after a fantastic dream during the night I feel so deep a need to write the dream down, it's just a pity to let it pass away, it can get forgotten in less than an hour. So I code this tool just for that, keep your dream journal.<p>http://keepdream.com<p>I am a one-man team wearing so many hats, currently a graduate student in Shanghai.<p>Give my startup some comments or suggestions. Thank you.
That's cool, but the YC app question about "What do you know that your competitors just don't get" applies here. The core functionality seems twitter-like (and with a twitter API, you could get everyone's twitter dreams displayed on this site too).<p>You need something that is unique and distinct about this dream journal compared to the world of microblogging. I do, however, like being able to read about other's dreams in Chinese though.
Too Twitter-y. You need clever fresh terminology (i.e. not "Following") and a slightly different design. It looks good, but I get an "I've seen this before" feeling. If you're targeting English and Chinese speakers, it could be cool to incorporate that into the design, probably to the extent that non-Chinese speakers can safely parse the characters as "icons" though.<p>You definitely need something that makes it standout. Why shouldn't I just write down my dreams or post them on my blog? I could see some cool text pattern recognition features encouraging me to post a dream; that is, who else had a dream like this last night/ever? You mention natural language processing, so perhaps you've already got something like that in mind...<p>Being able to reply to individual dreams might be annoying, though maybe we could post "interpretations" (in the Freudian sense).
This is a pretty cool idea. I guess that your success will depend on whether or not it's an interesting place to go to read about other people's dreams, though: in most communities there is a real gap between personal use and people who contribute.<p>So you should allow people to sort by language, for example.<p>It is much more in the nature of a social experiment than a tech startup, but I think it's pretty cool.
I'd recommend adding a simple client, that syncs with the site. And think about the situations under which someone wakes up:<p>Are they definitely going to have internet access? Nope. Better have an offline mode.<p>Is their computer going to be on already? Maybe not. Better give it an automatic start-on-startup option, and make sure it's lightweight enough to open in a flash.<p>Are they going to wake up with <i>their</i> computer around them? Probably so, really, or at least the majority of the time. So a desktop client's a good call, because it doesn't have to be portable, and you can store detailed settings, because they're not going to be changing them over multiple computers.<p>Also, you're a grad student in Shanghai? Wouldn't an SMS interface be well-received? I sense potential twitter partnerships!<p>If you want to talk about this anymore, I hang out in #startups on irc.freenode.net a lot. I like your idea, I'd love to help you brainstorm more.
Kind of cool. I could see it being a bit hard for the casual browser to find dreams of interest to them. I've seen others suggest tags or categories, either of which could prove useful. But you might also want to include a simple reddit-esque up/down vote for dreams people liked reading. That way people can just view the most interesting dreams.
If you're going to be displaying Chinese content for an English audience, you should look at integrating some sort of translation support. I'd recommend the Adso plugin:<p><a href="http://adsotrans.com/blog/adsotrans%e7%9a%84%e7%bd%91%e4%b8%8aapi%e7%9c%9f%e7%9a%84%e5%8e%89%e5%ae%b3%e5%be%b7%e4%b8%8d%e5%be%97%e4%ba%86/" rel="nofollow">http://adsotrans.com/blog/adsotrans%e7%9a%84%e7%bd%91%e4%b8%...</a><p>Once users click on text the content gets semantically analysed and annotated with pinyin/english popups.
I like it.<p>Don't expect to get huge, but this is a cool app for your portfolio and if you start pulling huge traffic you could make a couple hundred a month in ads.<p>Try making a facebook app with the same functionality? Sometimes those get lucky and get huge and making facebook apps is a decent skill to learn.
probably doesn't hurt if you try integrating this with facebook/open social<p>maybe some icons that quickly classify (like right next to the title) dreams would be good too (nightmares, happy, sexual, weird, mundane, ....) (in addition to tags)