A project that I thought was a good idea

A little while ago, I embarked on two side projects, one called www.Topicala.com, Topicala at the time was quite a sucessful test project that gets a fair few users.

The second was called iforgive.eu and iforgiv.eu.

I bought the .eu domains when they came out because I thought that I had a good marketing change with "I forgive u", since other .us domains had become popular ala del.icio.us. I had several ideas for this domain and I will list them now, each of which would never work out.

• Iforgive.eu - The Flower shop for all your forgivness needs
• Iforgive.eu - The forgivness website where you put your sins for all to see on the site and then you will be peer assesed as to whether you derve forgiveness
• Iforgive.eu - The forgivness website where you send an open email to the person you wronged and then the public will see if they forgive you or not.

The first idea was okay, but I would not have been able to get it off the ground. It would have been trading soley on the name. That and right now I don't particularly want to run a shopping site at the moment (especially since we have a young toddler to contend with)

The latter two ideas really were open to abuse. I like the idea of these social networking sites, so I was trying to play off that. However there would be no way to stop slander, fraudulent posts and also defamation. Futhermore, what about victim support, someone has been wronged, and their purportrator is openly harrasing them in public.

That put three ideas in the bin straight after I had spent the money on the domains. Being the tightwad I am with money I decided to think some more about what I can do with it. So I came up with a couple more ideas. I got my lateral thinking cap on and tried to think of things soley associated with the name. I came up with plenty of ideas, but the two that stuck out where:

• If Or Give - The open experiment with social charity giving. The site would exist only to generate revenue to be given to charity any person could donate money to the site or they could decide to give all the money in the pot at that time to a particular charity.
• If Or Give - The open experiment into questions and answers.

The first idea seems reasonable, but at the time I don't think I could set it up. Likewise I also am not too sure how to get the money in to the charity. And also I am not too sure if it would be ethical or open to abuse.

The second idea has been done before! Grr

My final idea, is one where I set it up as a simple site that hosts my .Net 2.0 experiments that I might talk about on this blog.

So here I am at the end of this. I am asking you to leave comments to recommend suggests as to what I should do with the domain name. The suggestions can be funny, serious etc, what ever you can think of.

I may even implement one of them.

Also, may this be a lesson to anyone about starting a business or site etc. Think of what you want to do BEFORE you buy the domain name. :)