Here's an example of an application of the idea of a personal nest. #

Little Pork Chop allows you to create a paragraph-length tweet, which it breaks up into 140-character packets that Twitter can process. #

I'd like to add a feature that creates an archive of your writing. So maybe someday you'd be able to review them all and see the progression of your thinking. Or possibly make them public, so they can appear in other places (such as your blog, or Facebook, or some new aggregator that might show up).#

Where to store it? Today's Little Pork Chop is a free app. It costs me nothing to run it, and even if it grows huge, it still will cost very little. It's good advertising for me, keeps my work on people's minds. Totally worth the effort for me, and almost all the code runs on your machine. My server just acts as a conduit to shuttle your ideas to Twitter's cloud. But adding permanent storage to this app makes it much more complicated and problematic.#

On the other hand, if you had an online nest, you could create a folder there, call it Short Ideas, say, and give my app access to it. Then when you post something, it would automatically deposit a copy, in a standard format, in that folder. Even if you stored it there for 100 years, the cost probably wouldn't add up to more than a penny. Today's servers are very good at storing small bits of text cheaply.#

However, we don't have such a place. So if I wanted to implement the feature, I would have to store the backup for you, probably in Amazon S3. It would work fantastically today, but wouldn't be much of an archive because I'm just a person. How long would it last? Not very long because people don't last so long, or they lose interest, move on, etc. So it gets expensive to try out a small idea, so we don't try so many, and progress slows, or only progresses in directions that allow startups to make money by aggregating data about us, or selling access to to advertisers. Seems silly to trade all that for a simple archive of your paragraph-length ideas.#

The nest approach would be easy. Any other approach would be, it seems to me, unworkable.#

Update: I added this feature to Little Pork Chop. I'll do the hosting of the RSS feed in my space. I wish it were in the users' space. #

I just got a link from United asking for my feedback on a recent flight. It so happens I have feedback. But first I had to answer questions I was unwilling to answer. So I decided just to post a note here. If they see it great, if not, no problem.#

The idea is about their wifi service. I basically always want to use wifi. The process of signing up for it was unbelievably tedious, and when I finally did get through, the service was unusably slow. It was only $3. I watched a movie instead.#

On the way back, I started the signup again, maybe the slowness on the wifi on the way out was a fluke. It wanted me to go through the whole signup process again. It hadn't remembered any of the data it made me enter, plus all the CAPTCHAs to make sure I'm really a person. That's ridiculous. I didn't bother.#

Here's the idea. 1. Let me use my frequent flier number to sign up. Because it already has a credit card attached to it, I wouldn't have to enter that. 2. Let me use miles to pay for the service. Isn't that consistent with the way they think about perks like this? Then the low quality of the service might not feel so bad. #