A personal approach to succeed with your ideas
I was reading a post by Eric talking about small ideas and projects and I must say that I completely agree with him. Small ideas are good to succeed and you don't even spend that much to implement them; it's easier to succeed within a pack of ten small ideas than finding a breaking app in any area. I'm in that group of people that have tons of ideas but almost never finish one of them just because I spend too much time thinking about it scope and usefulness of them.
I guess the best approach to do what you like and what motivates you is to "Just Do It", but we are individuals and therefore, we don't have enough free time to spend in every aspect of our lives and in all our personal projects. I posted some time ago my impressions about this world of small projects and ideas, about how much time should one individual spend in thinking about a new idea before it gets outdated and obsolete or even before any other individual out there comes out with the same idea and develop it faster than you.
This is the reason why I think you should think a bit about your ideas, filter them, and select the most appropriate ones to work in, applying some kind of criteria to select the best ones, but this is just up to you because it depends on your personal likes ... Anyway, this is a hungry IT world where we all have similar ideas and it's quite near impossible to be successful with one of yours, and that's why you should have your own private personal idea pool.
I think the best way to develop an idea from your pool is applying the "Just Do It" pattern, but also doing a release as fast as possible to get community feedback and see if you should keep investing time in that idea. Actually, a release-feedback-refactor cyclic model is pretty useful for this small development teams and helps others to know about your work, comment and even contribute. And what the bleep, isn't this the idea behind community projects like gotdotnet, sourceforge, etc... ??
I'll try to apply this pattern to my self-developed idea pool, and let's see if I get better results in producing my upcoming ideas... :-)
