More Silly Extension Ideas

Today, the Chrome web store launched some more monetization options for app/extension developers.  It's a welcome change to allow easier free trials and in-app purchases, which is a good thing if you have something people are willing to pay for.  I have to say it's admirable that they want to make things easier for app/extension developers, but it doesn't exactly help me figure out what to do with my extension.  Should I charge for extra services?  Give a free trial?  Argh.

There's a more difficult hurdle to face as a developer: most users expect apps to be free or extremely cheap, and copycats are easy to create (download the javascript to some other extension, modify it slightly and re-upload as your own); making free knock-offs isn't difficult.  I'm of the mind that any valuable extension or service has to have an offering that is not part of the extension / app itself, but is rather an online service of some sort that is difficult to copy.  The extension itself is just a delivery mechanism.

Anyways, I'm going to try making up some crazy ideas some more, since I wasn't able to find a specific article about startup recruitment from a while ago.  So instead I'll try to make up some more silly, bad ideas:

1. Enhance my user-agent extension so that people can manage all their settings online and have them automatically pre-populate to anyone who installs it in their company / domain.  (and maybe charge for it?)
2. An encryption extension that looks for certain headers from specific websites (that know your personal public key) and encrypts all the traffic between you and the website, on top of ssl.
3. An extension that tracks your web usage and shows you where you went, how much time you spent on different sites, etc.
4. A chrome app that is a glorified text editor where you could easily edit extensions, save them locally, and upload them to the web store (now with programmatic uploads!)

Maybe I'm thinking a bit too much about writing Chrome apps/extensions today because of the post, but at least it's good practice...