Mashing Up New Communities

December 14th, 2005

I’ve posted before about my desire for a “new” type of web community platform that can be implemented for specific niche areas. In my case, I want it to take Wakeboarder.com from a standard news community site into something with user-contributed news, tagging, photo sharing, social networking, and bookmarking.

Charlie O’Donnell of Union Square Ventures touching on this idea, but with a twist.

Charlie wisely suggests using APIs to pull the data from other bigger applications to make a remixed site for a specific niche area.

I was thinking about local portals the other day and how complicated it would be to set something up, but what if I could just pull down some HTML and start pasting together services. I could have a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn site that lists Bay Ridge personals, all the Bay Ridge MySpacers, Bay Ridge City Search results, Meetups in Bay Ridge, Bay Ridge jobs from Indeed, a full explorable rendition of Flickr just from people in the Bay Ridge Zip Code… etc, etc.

So in my case I could have wakeboarding personals, wakeboarding myspacers, waekboarding search results, wakeboarding meetups, wakeboarding jobs, wakeboarding photos from Flickr, wakeboarding vidoes, etc.

I think in my particular case I’d only need to do part of that since the users of my community already create so much content. I already have more wakeboarding photos submitted from users than all the wakeboarding photos in Flickr. But that’s not really the point, the point is that it would be very cool and very easy to create specific sites based on APIs. Open it up people!

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Entry Filed under: Random, Web 2.0