I’ve been thinking about the posts that Markus from Plentyoffish posts on his blog, where he claims the online dating companies are afraid of being left behind by the social networks, and free dating sites. But my question is, where are the social networking sites that get the mix right? If myspace is all about hooking up, then why don’t they make that a crucial tool. Enhance that experience! One of the most important things in any business, especially a service/product like a website is to study how people are using your site and adapt to that. Enhance the way they interact with your site, make what they already enjoy about your site even better. I’ve got a great idea for how to do this, if you’re interested, email me brian[at]webpl[dot]us.

A few people emailed me asking me to elaborate on my claim that employing open source as a promotional tool and community building tool were good ideas. A few also asked if I’d consider it for my upcoming web apps. Well let me answer the second part first: yes we are considering it. Why? Well let me get to that.

You are all probably thinking “WTF why would I give away my IP?” well the concept that you are building a single product in the software as a service market is slightly false. You are building a platform more than anything; a platform that will be the base for your service. The best way to build a community around this is to let others help build the platform or foundation. I am not saying give it away for commercial purposes, i.e. don’t let someone resell your code, but do let them add on to it.

As a developer of a platform your goals should be: make it as good as it can, and get as many people as possible to use it (maybe not that order, but I’ll leave that up to you). When you are strapped for cash, the easiest way to build your startup is using open source, so why not use the open source community to help build your community? If you give the tools away, enough builders will find them useful that you are likely to find at least someone interested.

There is another MAJOR point I failed to cover in the previous post: costs. Free for life accounts as we’ve seen on any number of web services are expensive to run. You generate next to no revenue from them, but they drain computing power. So how do you alleviate that? Let the people who aren’t interested in paying run it on their own hardware and bandwidth. If someone is THAT interested in trying it, but not able or willing to run it themselves, they should be willing to pay a nominal fee for that privilege, it is only fair.

So those reasons hopefully explain a bit more the thought process I’ve been utilizing in analyzing this subject.

The consumer generated media session was pretty interesting today. The speaker list included:

• Robert Levitan, CEO, Pando
• Itzak Cohen, CEO, ClipSync
• Chris O’Brien, CEO and co-founder, Motionbox
• Ted Murphy, CEO, PayPerPost
• Mark Brenner, CEO, vidavee

Pando offers a hybrid p2p distribution system, could be interesting, don’t know too much about it. They are offering licensing and distribution using a torrent like system to reduce costs.

ClipSync is something of a hybrid social video site that is centered around watching videos together. Sort of taking the physical interaction of a blockbuster night out of it, and making it distributed. I’m not convinced, but maybe I just have better things to do with my time than sit in front of my computer while my friends sit in front of theirs and watch a video together.

Motionbox is another clever online video editing tool. Eyespot is something like it that was out about a year ago.

Payperpost - Do I really need to explain this one? I’m curious as to what the long term strategy is with this one. They are a Florida startup too, so that makes me even more curious.

Vidavee - Another white label tool for publishing video content (similar products from videoegg and brightcove abound)

So whats the verdict? All in all it was an interesting topic, I had it running in the background so I can’t give too much of an opinion just yet on some of these products, but I wasn’t wowed by anything I hadn’t seen elsewhere before. Payperpost’s strategy could be the most far reaching of any of these companies.

So a distant relative of mine, Jorge Arango, in Panama (the country, not the party town in Florida) just posted info about their first usability/IA workshop in the area. UXCamp Panama was probably the first of its kind in all of central america, just don’t quote me on that.

Its great to see growth in the communities of web developers all over the world. Now if only we could get the UXCamp to come here to Miami too…