During the course of the day, there are an average or 20 or 30 ideas that go bouncing around in my head.  Wherever I go, I bring with me a notebook or folded up piece of printer paper in order to capture these ideas before my mind moves on to something else.  The next step in this process is knowing whether an idea is good enough to use to create a business.

How can the great ideas be separated from the bad and then further developed into businesses?  The most obvious answer for me would be to use Twitter. Instead of sending several emails that could take hours to email and sort, one could post a single twitter post and alert all of their followers to a possible idea.  Forcing the aspiring entrepreneur to describe the idea in one or two sentences will help to add clarity to the idea.  This is very important because it can be the most difficult part of pitching a business idea.  Just ask these entrepreneurs who are pitching their ideas to one of the most popular venture capitalist firms in the bay area.

One problem that someone might bring up is the issue of someone possibly stealing your idea and using it as their own.  Twitter posts can be seen by hundreds, possibly thousands of your friends, as well as those who search for words used in your tweet.  As stated in several articles written by Ben Casnocha, this paranoia shows only that you are “naive” in regards to the actual work required to start a company.

I have to give credit to Penelope Trunk and Jamie Varon for giving me the two halves of this idea via a response to an email and a blog post, respectively.  There is a large amount of research that should be done on any idea before creating a business behind it and I feel that Twitter is possibly an untapped resource for this research.

What do you think?  Have I anticipated all of the potential downsides of this strategy?  Let me know what you think in the comments!