This follows on the earlier 7 free project ideas piece, posted earlier today. 

8. I love Dropbox, but it's going to go down someday, and I don't know how to prepare for that. It's also a huge red bull's eye for hackers. It's wonderful, but like all good things, there comes a time when it must decentralize. Preparing for that day, we're going to need an open source Dropbox clone. It's a lot to do in a 24-hour hackathon, but you could get started, and possibly make something that's useful. It would be worth it just to find out what the issues are in implementing a multi-user file synchronizer.  

9. Following on #8, we still haven't got drop-dead simple static hosting. But we're getting there, with Dropbox. I'd like to have a folder named Apache, and inside it are folders with the names of domains that I've mapped to a magic IP address. When a request comes in for that host, look in my Apache folder, if you find a match, serve the file from there. Yes, Dropbox already has a Public folder. That's why this can't be a commercial offering, Dropbox would squash it immediately. But it would be a killer add-on for an open source Dropbox clone.  

10. NYU is a great university, and there's a lot going on here, but no best place to go to find out what. Wouldn't it be great if every university had a fantastic news site, with a small number of feeds to go with it. Start with your campus and work out from there. Give us a great news site. I know it's not going to blow anyone away, but sometimes tech projects are just useful. And boring. ;-) 

11. In the 1990's we used an web server called MacHTTP. It was configured with menus, dialogs, pop-ups. Almost anyone could figure it out. Fast-forward to today and MacHTTP is gone and we configure our web server with a weak, cryptic, confusing, ugly config file format. Come on, let's get our shit together and catch up to where were 15 years ago. Start a simple open source graphic user interface for Apache.