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.
This is very cool. More Web 2.0 sites should go open source so we can all learn how they work and so we can advance the field.
It’s really unfortunate that so much of our community’s work is in the dark.
this is a weird site
it’s focus is loosely everywhere w/ petty conversations of nothing
and their slogan sucks - no pun intended
as for the “open source”, i’m not a tech person - but i say, create your own(code) - don’t use mine
I think we are reaching a closing point for new social networks. Sure there will always be niches, but I really don’t think we’ll see the likes of MySpace or Facebook-sized networks. I’m all for web sociality, but I think centering them around a niche and/or features is the wrong way to go about it.
Sociality has significant value, I just think newer services should build more on the network side and become more “open”.
as a non-active member of consumate i think its great that they are going to release the code. More web 2.0 sites should do this and allow us all to build better sites and applications.
Viva open source!
I think your idea re: Pitchfork is a good one.
Pitchforkmedia.com isn’t quite a music blog, though. Yeah, they recently introduced RSS feeds and permalinks for their news stories, reviews, and features, they don’t seem to be big on feedback. You won’t see any comments from users on the site. Years ago, they decided user feedback belonged on a separate message board, instead. Then they shut down the board. Similarly, they used to answer reader mail a long time ago. After a while, they published mail only sporadically. Then, not at all.
Pitchfork is a ‘zine. They’ve been around since 1996, and they’re still a one-way media source, albeit a tremendously influential one. Because of all that, some kind of reader community would indeed be a good thing. There’s one of considerable size over at last.fm:
http://www.last.fm/group/Pitchfork/forum
Still, it’s awfully small compared to the large number of PF readers.
Oh the irony
a site for geeks going opensource
As a long time member, I watched consumating boom and some of these commenters really underestimate the power of a loyal community. And with consumating’s community being what it is… i expect to see some really nice features created by the community and eventually added to the consumating code. There’s a lot of well-educated people on that site who apparently have free time on their hands and a lust to enjoy consumating. Offer them the ability to make it their own and add new features is like baiting Micheal Jackson with a 12 yr old boy. I’m not saying everyone on the site is an amazing web programmer. Like every site, it has its share of teeny-boppers. But the core community of consumating is pretty strong and pretty diverse across the various fields of technology.
I see this as an excellent move to advance the site and quickly begin adding new features.
oh pls…it is hard for me to digest when “html” coders are called “geeks”.
Open source open schmource. I tried out Consumating a few months ago (as an open-minded-but-not-angsty single geek) and found it to be… er, how do I put this politely? Not exactly my taste.
Okay, more specifically, I was surprised and annoyed at how it was seemingly trying way too hard to be hip, cool, oh-so-winky-cute while simultaneously being amazingly unfunctional. Is learning about someone’s favorite smurf or favorite word that starts with the letter Z anything other a boring display of potential cleverness? Personally, I’d rather know whether my potential girlfriend smokes, whether she’s 430 or 130 pounds, what her (non-work) hobbies are, and where she’s traveled in the world. Just color me a pragmatic, elitist, non-hipster geek, I guess.
For a much more interesting social/dating service, check out okcupid.com (of which I’m a member; no other affiliation).
Diff between web 1.0 bust and web 2.0 bust…. In web 2.0 companies wont shutdown, they will get OpenSource’d.
So in next couple of years, you will see plenty of new open source apps.And these are well tested and deployed.
I believe configuration and bandwidth is the key in future.
If you have an idea - pick open source applications - configure it and buy enough bandwidth - you are ready with a site.
So I guess by your standerds
Web2.0 site creators wont be called Programmers
they will be called modders
That is one butt ugly site.
There are plenty of good open source projects out there, hard to imagine this will get much attention.
I think most of you are retarded.
How hard is it to make a social networking site anyways?
Great move. The power is in the community as it *isn’t* hard to make a social networking site these days. My question is: how can we be notified when this actually happens?
I think this a sign that social networking has gone phase 2.0 not web 2.0. Banner ads, personalization, even search engines had their growth phase and slow down. The concept of community and social networking has peaked (and not fast enough, I haven’t seen people throwing money at bad ideas this quickly since 1999) and sure you can grab some open source code to do it, but who really cares? This time next year, we won’t be discussing “community” and social networking, you will be hearing something new…
I agree with Dan - peaked and ready for the new. And if you know what it is, let me know…
“Diff between web 1.0 bust and web 2.0 bust…. In web 2.0 companies wont shutdown, they will get OpenSource’d.”
true that. when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.
is MICROSOFT thinking about OPEN SOURCE its products and services?
What language / framework was it written in?
I agree with Christopher Sisk…and I am a consumating user since ever. Awesome community, awesome site. Those who don’t like it: what’s the deal? You can find something else…maybee.
Consumating rocks, Ben Brown rocks
i’m really excited - the site has some great interactive features. however, for serious use, i’m way more interested in http://www.elgg.org, already open source and quite evolved with loads of new features including wiki integration…
when i read some of the comments by people here, i really start to wonder about the level of engineering talent here.
it appears that most comments regarding technology/software are by people who really have no idea of how to build a scalable n-tier app.
i’m sure there are plenty of open source apps that are used to create social networking sites. i’m also sure that the vast majority are unsuitable for real worl situations where you want to know the app is secure, and that the app can handle 1000’s of users.
the hope would be that any app from cnet, would meet the above criteria.
livejournal , as well as the open source ’social network’ from redhat appear to meet the criteria, as does the ‘people aggregator” app.
but hey…. in this day, anybody who can create a login page thinks that they’re an app engineer, and that getting an app running with mysql is a big thing!! running a test/prototype all on a single system is one thing, but any app that’s going to scale to 1000’s of users will have to be well designed to include a number of different technologies/approaches.
peace…
Daniel Haran> there’s a video interview with the founder of Consumating, Ben Brown on Podtech, if I recall from the video (and from the file extensions used on the site) it is written all/mostly in Perl.
http://www.podtech.net/lunchme.....onsumating
Thanks Andrew!
… better be well designed
Adam > If you want to think of Consumating as a “dating” site, then you’ve got one really big advantage over the “fill out a form and we’ll tell you who you should date” type sites… Interaction. Consumating is all about openness and interaction between users. If you want to know if someone smokes, ask them. That’s something you can’t do on other “dating” sites without paying hefty membership fees. Consumating members talk about themselves through Questions of the Week where they answer with text, pictures and video (VideoEgg) … I think this gives you a much better idea of what a person is like than a filled-out form. Almost all users upload picture frequently and compete in the weekly themed photo contests… so there’s you “is she 430 or 130 lbs?” (if you’re really that shallow) … there’s also a multitude of ongoing conversations you can get into to learn more about the users. Or you can attend one of the hundreds of local consumeets hosted by users to actually meet and get to know people better.
On the other hand… Consumating ISN’T a dating site… Consumating is a social networking site based on user interaction. There’s also a nice “popularity” contest side of things that gets a lot of users quite addicted to the site.
Daniel > I second that I’m pretty sure its mostly written in Perl.
Dave: We appreciate your support! Thanks for the shout out.
I think Ben’s done the right thing here - the traction and support we’ve got from the open source community is awesome. Consumating has one use case; once they’ve got thousands of sites running their software (as we do with ours), they’ll discover that all the different kinds of requirements and uses turn it into a much stronger piece of software.
For the moment, though, it’s likely to be a challenge. Centralised sites can often be spaghetti-like under the hood, and preparing them to be a product rather than a destination can be difficult. However, I have a lot of respect for Ben, and I think he probably knows exactly what he’s doing.
karikatürlerden dolayı yüce rabbim sizlere cehennemi bile dar edecektir
kafirliğin bile sınırı vardır.
Any update on this story?