I don't think you should lump CrowdVine's culture with Ning and KickApps. They both took massive amounts of funding (I think $44M and $22M). That means they can build something massive as long as it's going to be massively profitable. We on the other hand, are 2.1 geeks running a profitable company who are enjoying the hell out of being independent. That means we can do whatever interests us as long as it's not too expensive and we can continue to meet the relatively low bar of paying the rent.

I think a lot about how CrowdVine could be turned into a platform. Feature-wise we've limited ourselves to the basic social networking features. When we've needed more features we've integrated with someone else. Our early revenue came from consulting work where we built more complicated social networks on top of the CrowdVine platform. We're getting ready to launch a CrowdVine for Conferences product that's also based on the same platform.

There's a lot of apps that would benefit from having a stronger social network base. I think about my time at Odeo. We had basic social network features but we were also struggling to make our podcast spider run as fast as possible. There was no way to prioritize social network features over our core podcast features. The only way we were going to get a strong social network feature set is if someone else provided it. That battle is getting worse with all the new social networking standards coming out.

The core decision that I'm wrestling with is how to present the platform, as open source code or as an API? Our internal successes have used the source code as our platform. Is that too old school? Are people expecting their platforms to be hosted by someone else now?

Definitely interested in feedback: tony at crowdvine dot com