The Department of the Treasury today awarded $2,500 to six people for their winning ideas for new financial services applications.

Most of the ideas centered on helping consumers spend more wisely.

The winning idea from Collin O’Rourke, 26, Waukegan, Ill., was:

I want an app that lets me enter purchases and rate/track how happy they do or don’t make me over time, so I can adjust my spending accordingly.

The other winning ideas were:

• I want an app that locates people around you who are willing to trade away an item that you would have otherwise purchased, then facilitate the trade.
• I want an app that calculates the return on investment for college, based on expected net cost of tuition at specific colleges and anticipated salary by major.
• I want an app that shows real costs. If I put $100 shoes on a credit card with 18% rate, what do they really cost me? What would $100 do if invested instead?
• I want an app that will set guidelines for my expenditures in accordance to my yearly salary and will periodically inform me of my remaining spending capacity.

(That last one was submitted by a 16-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y.)

It is nice that Treasury sponsored this idea contest, officially called the MyMoneyAppUp Challenge, but the ideas are just one liners. There is no correlation between the ideas and their execution or consumer demand. Take that second idea, about facilitating the trade of items the user is willing to trade. How this is an idea that “helps Americans make smart financial choices,” as was the contest’s aim, is beyond me. Be that as it may, how exactly is the app “facilitating the trade”? As any software developer knows, the devil is in the details of the information architecture.

We should also point out that we asked Treasury how and why they chose judges from Google and Facebook — the only judges from private enterprises other than a venture capitalist, mind you — and never got a direct response. Certainly, Google and Facebook didn’t mind the publicity.

But that is a small quibble. At least Treasury, and by extension the federal government, recognizes that it can foster financial services innovation, not just financial services regulation. You’ve got to be thankful for the small victories, right?