Wedding Table Planner

In a week from now, I will attend the wedding of a friend of mine. A few days ago, I RSVPed online and right at that moment I got curious about whether this wedding RSVP service provided some wedding table planner tools. It simply couldn’t, because RSVP form did not have any questions or fields regarding my close friends or colleagues. At that very moment, I understood that Facebook would be the killer platform for building a wedding table optimization app.

I am still not married and don’t know how much effort is needed for the wedding table optimization (best friends go to same table without leaving anybody at the same table with people they don’t know). Coming from an industrial engineering background, I can at least sense how big of an optimization problem should it be for the bride and groom. So why not outsource the RSVP process through Facebook, in which an internal engine could set up an initial table setting based on guests’ own friends that are invited to the event. It can even score the closeness of a friend pair based on either number of mutual friends, number of mutual wall posts or etc. Then the bride and groom can fine tune the details, add out-of-facebook guests to some empty points and voila, every guest is optimized happy! The Friend Wheel application has already completed much of the groundwork on that front!

Economics? Ok, barely an app is making money from Facebook but come on, isn’t the wedding one of those rare economic phenomenas that have a nearly complete price inelasticity?

Turkish Fantasy Football (Soccer)

Up to facebook’s rise and shine in Asia Minor, I could only list a few addictions that could be related to the whole population. One of them would be soccer. Right at these days every year, the life stops to speculate, watch and fight about the opening games of Turkish football league. Then came Facebook, as another general population addiction (Turks being #4 in overall population and #1 in non-English speaking population in Facebook rankings). Yet, I am disappointed that nobody came with a fantasy football app on Facebook that combined these two socioeconomical addictions in the perfect platform! I am pretty much inclined to take equity in such a venture, but be quick! The opening match is today!