djaiss
commented
5 years ago This is indeed what I had in mind when I first built the product. I dreamt of a system that would tell me what gifts I should buy for my young nephews 😀
The first version of this idea would be to provide a general list of gifts, classified by budget, gender, age. This list would be accessible by API on the hosted version, then as you said, every instance (even our hosted one) would query it.
No personal data would ever be recorded, of course.
The feature would have to be opt-in, for privacy sake.
We won't charge anything for this, but we could use Amazon affiliate links. We need to take into account the different countries for the Amazon stores.
I'm not sure what your plans are for this, but it sounds like the perfect feature to build with monetisation in mind.
It would be possible to add something like "preferences" or "interests", for contacts, and have them be selectable from a prebuilt list of options that companies could then bid on, at monicahq.com. Monica is perfect for this, because you have a lot of information that can be used to target gifts at people.
As an example, a Monica instance could query monicahq.com for gift suggestions for "30 year old, woman, married, has 2 kids, interested in classical novels, the theatre, acoustic music, gift budget is $100". monicahq.com would then pick gift suggestions that target that person as best as possible, and the end user could then decide to buy or not buy those gifts based on whether they think the gifts are appropriate. You could easily charge on a cost-per-suggestion basis, or cost-per-click. No personal or identifying information is ever shared.
Obviously Monica being quite small means that this would start pretty small, but it seems like the most useful way to make "gift recommendations" work. At the start, we could add gift suggestions from places like Amazon; you could basically go through a bunch of different products and tag them based on "who would it be suitable for?", and then Monica would match those products to the people.
Perhaps I'm getting carried away with this, but I would -kill- for a system that'd suggest gifts based on what I know about people. Get to Christmas time, go through my list of contacts, pick out nice gifts for each person from a handy list of suggestions relevant to them. A while back, I wanted to send a gift to a friend to thank them for something they'd done, and Monica's suggestions system would've been -perfect- for that.