After all the crap I’ve had trying to get Outpost through the app store (today I’m told it crashes on launch— a situation no-one outside of Apple has yet encountered, even following their rather scant instructions) I’ve come up with an idea for a new microblogging service:

Ventr

It’ll support short posts (called ‘diatribes’ for branding purposes) of up to 2-3 times the length of the basic Twitter post length. This length is suggested to keep things short, but not so short that you can’t say what you need to.

The service will appeal to people (like me) who have no close-by folks of a similar persuasion whose ears could realistically be bent about the problem. As we all know, it’s no good to bottle it up, and bouncing complaints off a like-minded person can often lead to a solution (if not to the problem, then at least to the anger/frustration it has inspired). In these cases, it is better to be able to vent towards a generally like-minded populace in the hope that someone somewhere can either help solve/calm/quiet the whole situation. I’m sure psychiatrists would agree with me on this one.

The ‘killer feature’ for this app would be the hardest to put together, but I think it would be a winner. There would be some sort of time-sharing agreement going on with advertisers who own large LCD advertising (or public announcement) boards. They advertise on the site and in return they will occasionally put someone’s rant up on one of their hardware boards, for 30-60 seconds. At no particular time, etc.

This might sound crazy, but think about it— you’re stuck in traffic, absolutely fuming at the truck driver in front of you. You look up, and where the congestion report usually is you see a message from someone who’s just missed his daughter’s birth due to similar conditions. Suddenly you don’t really feel too bad for yourself any more; that has been replaced with compassion for the poor schmuck whose story just flashed up briefly on the board above you.

Doesn’t that sound great?

And just for starters, I volunteer that we get a big billboard just outside the App Store Review Board’s windows, which will display any diatribes containing ‘App Store’. That ought to get the message across, I think