mind you, I haven’t put up a Flickr, a del.icio.us, or similar — but IIRC the HotOrNot guys had pretty much that style at the start, and had to retrofit a way to get paid on, afterwards.

Hitting the nail on the head with that bit – my problem exactly! How does a mad [computer] scientist with no business sense get around? We need partners perhaps?

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000991.html

…unless is specifically solves a difficult (hard) problem that existing services (Bloglines, etc) don’t and won’t soon.

Still, very cool work.

Very true about the hard problem, though. I do tend to think, whether correctly or not, that some of the things I want to do with FeedReactor will be solutions to some interesting problems.. but that depends upon a) whether I’m not just full of it, and b) whether I’ll have the time to take it where it needs to go.

(Strangely enough, I love discovering when I’m full of it.)

The hardware is cheaper, the software is cheaper, the bandwidth is cheaper, and the tools are better.

But even more important we saw some of the largest banks in the world pour a not inconsiderable portion of their wealth for a few years into creating an educated class of both developers and users. Having participated in several dotcoms I can look back and point to the VCs for creating a huge number of the challenges we faced. But they also gave me a hell of a financial aid package for the best possible education in web development a person could hope for.

Ah, but what if FeedReactor were available to the Enterprise, internally managed, in a private and secure way? Any value there? I mean, I still can’t believe companies allow employees to use AIM instead of just throwing a Jabber server in place. (Oh, wait til Tiger for that one…)

Anyway, there probably is a business model, I just can’t see it, but then I’m just anothr hacker with little business sense…. sigh…

Feed processors aren’t for ordinary people, they are something that services like Bloglines want, or corporate IT groups want.

There are two ways to make money in this second category.

1) Get a business partner, and develop something that can be sold to software and services companies.

2) Develop a superb open source toolkit, and make money from customizing it.

The fact that feed processors will eventually be a part of Bloglines etc. is a plus, because organizations make build-buy decisions. If there’s a component that’s good, the bigger company may buy, license, or hire.