Useful: an encyclopaedia of smalls

The thing that strikes me about the useful web is the wonderful amateurness of it. I love the idea of people beavering away at home writing applications they think are fun or cool to then share, free of charge, with people they've never even met. My favourite space is the ecosystem on netvibes which is like some sort of virtual village fete with thousands of weird and wonderful widgets to liven up your netvibes page. (I like the aquarium).

These are quite cool too:

Pipes
Mosaic pictures made out of flickr photos
The musical genome (I've discovered some great stuff on here)
How geeks show they care
and then there's all the cool stuff on Facebook. Food fights, superpoke, virtual bookshelves and the like.

Now here's the thing. I'm not sure if many of these really count as 'useful'. They're diverting, engaging and certainly fun but not really 'useful' in the practical sense, and I think that's what makes them so great. The web has provided an outlet for all that creativity and invention that previously used to be relegated to the garden shed and only very occasionally recognised by some obscure department of the patent and trademark office. Now, anyone with the desire to create or invent can follow some relatively simple instructions and take their creation to market.

One other observation is that there are more and more sites and services springing up to help people create their own mashups and useful things. I'm sure there's a quote about the fact that with any craze or trend - from the gold rush to the web - the smart money is in the ancillary services. Here's a good one that lets you aggregate clips on of stuff onto one page.

So here are my 'useful' thoughts, based on my observations on what people have to say about M&S undies:

Most people (ok, girls) have underwear for all sorts of different occasions, but one or two 'favourites' that are so comfortable they feel like second skin, but have gone slightly grey from extreme overwear. And the trouble is that by the time you can bring yourself to part with them the chances are the place you bought them from has de-listed them. So how do you go about replacing them? Which stockist still has them? which line is most similar to them in line/style/fit?

So, my idea (for M&S) is a sort of 'encyclopaedia of smalls' where you can search using the catalogue code to find the closest thing on the market to your favourites. And of course it doesn't have to be restricted to underwear it could work for anything ...your favourite skirt, shoes, even makeup. Ideally it would have something of the Dear Annie column about it to give it a bit of personality and of course there would be lots of opportunities for user-gen comments and ideas.