Consumating Goes Open Source

I’m at SXSW and Ben Brown, co-founder of CNET-owned Consumating, just announced that they will be releasing “every single line of code” for Consumating within the next month.

Consumating is a dating and social networking website for “geeks” that CNET acquired back in December 2005.

Ben said that the community is the true value of Consumating and that the community has really built Consumating into what it is — and basically that he’d like to give it back to the people. He continued to say that since Consumating.com is focused around a specific niche community, he’d like to see other communities embrace the open-sourced code and use it.

There will be a new position at Consumating called an ‘Open Source Manager’, whom will manage all of the open source — and roll good changes back into Consumating.com itself. Ben said the code will be licensed under The MIT License.

My initial thought was whether Consumating would be offering a hosted solution of their back-end for websites to easily implement — such as allowing the music blog Pitchfork to create their own dating / social network for their passionate music readers. Ben said they aren’t planning to do that, but that anyone could take the source code and create that solution — “maybe I’ll do that.”

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. Steve is at SXSW and would love to chat with anyone — feel free to email him.