CustomerCentrix

Opportunity for killer app?

As I was reading the September issue of Business 2.0, I noticed The $50 Million Giveaway article. In particular, the $3M - Social Networks Meet The Town Crier. When I have looked at Craigslist to which this idea was compared, I thought like many others that it was simple but functional. Not much fancy UI or features, just a nice idea that took off.

This idea could be implemented without a huge investment of time and possibly short circuited with the use of some open-source software. As we might expect, this was noticed by lots of others in blogs and articles on the 'net, including by a drupal developer. Drupal is the software that we are using for this site and others and seems like it might be a good fit for this project. The comment by the drupal developer is certainly overstated, that it would cost $1 and have the rest left over, but there is definitely some good stuff to start with.

Seems to me that the biggest things needed to implement this would be some creativity and quick programming. Although, Drupal appears to me to be a nicely done application, the terminology reflects the typical open source (geek) roots by using words like node, content, aggregator and such. So, technically Drupal could provide much of what is needed, but the presentation would need to be changed/improved. Instead of the standard node types, we could make a news article, classified ad listing, photos or other things that would make sense to the average non-technical person. Possibly use the idea of a wizard or multi-page data entry form to lead users quickly and easily through site registration and posting their garage sale or whatever. I think that there needs to be an email reminder system or something that makes it "sticky" so that users return often to view and add things, along with some smart purging or archiving to prevent it from getting stale. Seeding the system with data such as zip codes and other location data, rss feeds and automating some of the starter materials that would help to draw people to it and make it useful and interesting when a location doesn't have any regular users yet. I have always liked the idea of doing something interesting with census data (free and no copyright). We could use this to load all of the locations and provide some rotation of automated facts/statistics, such as "Paducah has about the same number of industrial workers as Juneau has fishermen" or trivia questions like "Are there more people under the age of 25 or over in our county?". Other things would also need to be added like integrated local maps from Yahoo, Google or Mapquest and weather details. Something would be needed to keep people coming back and wanting to build an online community.

Some user interface tweaking, maybe a little coding and some clever SQL to push data into the system. Then the harder part of getting some time to help Mr. Lussier notice it among the other masses of folks that are probably deluging him with "here is my idea, can I have the $3 mil now?".

Bio info on James Lussier is available at NVP, along with a few blurbs from other places where he is a board member or has been a speaker. He is also a Wharton Alum, so maybe I should populate the system first with Philadelphia neighborhood data to help bring back fond memories of undergraduate times. Wish that I could find some more personal data on him, to use some things that are interesting to him. But, I don't see anything of that nature available in the search engines and digging deeper would probably be bordering on crossing the privacy line.