things scratched into the table of trendy coffee shops must be true

So, this came to me while walking about, bear with me.

You see, web 2.0 is all about communities and shit, and that’s great. It’s also all about web-browsers, and making them do things they weren’t designed to do, which is also great (if you can do it right).

However, web-browsers are pretty clumsy tools, and you often end up scanning a pretty packed page for one little bit of information… for a dozen different pages. As such, my idea was this: what if you had an app that checked all your social networking sites, all your forums, all your email, and presented it in one unified interface?

I’m picturing a clean interface which immediately presents the user with a summary of what has happened on the interweb since they last looked. New photos of Britney’s third baby on her flickr, Brad’s snide comments on Emmy’s latest LJ entry, a PM from l33tcl0ud on the gentoo forums asking where you found those drivers, a friend request on facebook from some kid you sat next to at lunch once: all of it sat in one place, waiting your eager young eyes.

Of course, it’d be a complete bastard to set up, mostly because APIs for such websites are few and far between. Which is pretty fair, really – if your sole source of revenue was from pairing eyeballs with adverts, would you make it easy for someone to suck just the information they wanted off your server into a program?

OK, I would too, but that’s because I’m a beautiful young idealist whose startup would flop quicker than a penis on a British nudist beach.