Daniel Davies

I had a funny feeling this afternoon. It all began with a very silly idea I had a while back when every day someone in the office asked "What's the Sub of Day?". Fed up of waiting for Subway's Homepage to load, I spent five minutes banging out a simple web page which told people very clearly what the Sub of the Day was. It gets a fair amount of traffic, and I've managed to hunt links down from all over the web linking to it as "one of the most useful sites around". Flattering, if a little silly perhaps.

Like all "great" sites (please detect my sarcasm here), this was created to cure an itch. Many other people seem to have this itch, with on a good day over 300 hits coming in from Google. I never built it for others to use, I've never really marketed the site. I didn't even bother posting here when I made it - like I say, it was built for me, for fun!

Someone else had a similar idea today. My co-worker Andy pointed them to my site, and they immediately suggested a Twitter bot. The conversation continued, Andy telling him that this was already planned and would be out as soon as I found the time. A little more discussion arose around Twitter regarding Sub of the Day. More suggestions got fired at me - a REST API, shared Google Calendar, etc, etc. Then a few hours later a new Twitter account appeared.

People started saying "oh they beat you to it", asking if I was annoyed by this. I'm from a world where ideas are shared, and communities spring up around ideas. Not where ideas are "stolen". It seemed very strange to me that by someone implementing something I planned to do at some vague-point purely due to demand, rather than my own need for it, could some how annoy me. The fact someone took my idea and ran with it to create something was incredibly flattering - ideas are there to be shared, to be enjoyed by as many people as possible. The insinuation that I would be so selfish as to not want others to be able to play around with something was possibly the most insulting thing for me.

Unfortunately, people getting annoyed at an "idea being stolen" leads to closed, secretive development, and sub-standard final products. I almost learned this the hard way with Ideas Buffet. Sharing ideas, working with others and seeing what the basic conceptual seed can grow in to is the most fascinating thing about the web - let's not begrudge those who "beat us to things" but be pleased to see our ideas spread. Take comfort in the fact if someone felt your idea worth implementing themselves, you may have had a really good idea!

Andy Lockran has been in touch with me about a Wordpress plugin to display the Sub of the Day - if you want to display this on your own install you can download it from Andy.

I've setup an iCal feed which you can subscribe to, bringing the Sub of the Day to your desktop!

If you have a way to help answer the most important question faced by offices around the UK every day, let me know or link back to www.whatisthesuboftheday.co.uk. If you get in touch with me about it I'll be sure to get you a link on the main site! You can grab the source code of the site here - its nothing clever or fancy. Go forth and play, and remember to share any ideas you may have!