neonak

My6Sense (http://www.my6sense.com/) does something similar.

Why the boiling?

Did you use any seed money to start this? ;)

Best of luck, it's a great idea with lots of potential.

What you're describing looks like Google Living Stories. http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/

The code is open-source and there is even an Wordpress plugin.

BTW: I always wanted a website or newspaper that covered stories that made the headlines to investigate it years later, to see how these people are doing now or how events shaped their lives. Would be interesting to read.

Scott Adams (Dilbert) wrote a blog post about how to match people who would like to travel together, instead of packages, a couple of years ago. But the problems, namely trust, are essentially the same.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/how_...

His idea to connect people with GPS is something you could use. His screening idea's are something you could also incorporate.

To make this an succes I would create a social networking site so that everyone who wants to participate can be publicly hold accountable. If all my personal data is known to you I would think twice before I'd steal a package. A scoring system would bring up the most reliable people to do business with.

Steve Pavlina wrote a post about his one week on, one week off workflow. It's similar to the post that's discussed here. It doesn't really matter how long your on and off days are.

He uses his on days to get as much done as is possible and his off days to just do what he wants. In the off days he gets the inspiration and motivation for another round of high productive on days.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2010/02/one-week-on-one-wee...

I also noticed similar effects in my own life. It's like creating little deadlines for yourself where you have to get something done within a couple of days, and you make everything work to do just that. Within the 9-to-5, monday through friday mentallity it always seems if there will be another day to get it done. There's no pressure.

Also, the long days off indeed help to think creativly about your work and have idea's and solutions just 'pop up' at random.

Maybe Google did it to know who is reading their quarterly results, what portion they read exactly and what they do with the information.

They would have no way of knowing that if they just send it out as an press release.