unnoun.com was a first attempt at a generative AI app back in the gpt-3 days when it was not very accurate or fun to work with.
The idea behind it was generating data views in an intuitive way.
I maintain ranked lists of my favorite “things” as a way to better understand my own design preferences. The thing could be skyscrapers, cities, cars, sparkling water flavors, cities, you name it - if I find it interesting, its probably ranked in one of my lists.
To make the lists more interesting, I need to go out and find a picture of the thing and any extra information I want to add about it every time I add an item.
Unnoun was basically a way to make it easier. Want to know the heights of all the skyscrapers in the list? Just add a column called “height” and it would handle it.
You could also ask it to generate an entire spreadsheet, like a “list of tallest buildings”, or you could add a column to a preexisting spreadsheet and it would fill the column in for all rows.
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Adding a new row would also automatically fetch the data for preexisting columns so you could quickly saturate pre-existing spreadsheets as well. There was an importer for csv files.
It was fun to build and play with, but was never that accurate or reliable on the AI side. It turns out this spreadsheet use case for AI was obvious - so there are plenty of better tools for this out there for this now. You can even do this directly in excel these days.
Unnoun was built as a fork of the penna project. It used firebase as the backend.
It did have a fun feature of randomly assigning the color on every page refresh.
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