Potential Holy Shits

There are currently three ideas which whenever someone brings them up, I’m always interested in hearing about:

1) Technologies or products that attack a problem from a divide and conquer perspective. The best recent example is anything involving peer to peer technology. The original example was the Web. Any time someone points me at a product that takes this sort of approach, I sit up and listen because many problems are easier to solve when you throw bazillions of people at it. Anyone seen anything new here recently?

2) White lists. Less sexy, but certainly useful. White lists are a simple solution to the problem with spam. The idea being that you create a list of mail addresses from which you’re willing to receive mail and everything else is blocked or thrown into a junk folder. This makes it difficult for long lost college friends to find you, but it does mean less spam. It is a trivial idea, but in a web world of increasing useless noise, I often find myself wanting to OPT IN rather than OPT OUT.

3) Universal Identity. Microsoft continues to get it’s teeth kicked in with the Passport solution, but, honestly, they are trying to solve a tough problem here – a single sign-on for the Internet. Too bad they’re Microsoft. This may be one of those problems that everyone agrees must be solved, but doing so involves such a massive level coordination amongst entities with vastly different agendas that it may never be solved and I’ll continued to be forced to keep sixteen passwords in my head. Weak.

One might call these, potential holy shits.