This weekend I helped tar down loose shingles on my roof, fixed my gutters, repainted parts of my house including my garage door and roof-pipes, and installed a new window to meet city regulations.  I ended up paying about $100 in labor for two guys to help me out for a several hours.  Now just about everything we did I could have done on my own, but I didn’t know how to get started in a couple of cases and didn’t have all of the tools needed.

In the end it worked out really well but it was only because I happened to have a friend that had a friend that knew how to do this stuff.  I was fortunate to have this connection with someone that I trusted.  It struck me that there are so many needs in this industry.  Labor workers are constantly looking for small jobs to help out with.  Many home owners want to do things on their own, but may not know how to get started.  It seems a social network for organizing these kinds of jobs would be really nice to have.  As I was working with the laborers, we bonded in a certain way and became friends.  Some people could be employed by this social network just by helping people with home improvement stuff on a contractual basis.

Now creating a social network for just this purpose might not be a good idea just because there are so many networks that we can utilize for this purpose.  Instead we could program apps in Facebook for this purpose, but not everyone has a facebook account.  What we really need is a universal language for social networking applications, and an interface for social networks to communicate with each other.  After researching this, it seems Google is aiming for something like this.  Check it out here.

So there is hope for my home improvement social network!