kidmercury

I can't believe this barely got any attention amongst the web technology blogosphere, but it's a big deal: vBulletin just released a preview of vBulletin 3.7, which is essentially an open source social networking application.

A few points:

1. I am a big fanboy of vBulletin; they make awesome stuff, and they have a platform that I feel is years ahead of what others are doing. It is truly a platform that [some] developers love, and can use to create great stuff. If you want to see a platform that blows away Facebook, check out vBulletin.

2. To my peeps up in the niche social networking space: Tony, Marc, KickApps...ya'll gots to check this out. vBulletin is playing your game now.

3. vBulletin is making a couple of huge mistakes:

-- They are putting some of the members of their ecosystem out of business, as they have taken stuff that was in their open source community and integrated it into their core (I don't mean they actually stole the code; I mean they replicated the idea, thus making the add-on unnecessary). This has the potential to create an antagonistic relationship with the community, which is probably the fastest way to destroy your customer base. Instead, vBulletin needs to find a way to work with developers. Think profit-sharing.

-- vBulletin is still going with the straight sales approach; you can get a copy for $160. Seriously lame. Their valuation could be 10X or even more of what it currently is if they took a new strategic direction.

While this is very exciting, I think it is worth noting that the real potential in the open source social network is in the emergence of the world maker -- the one who customizes the social network to create something entirely new. I am of course biased here, as that is exactly what I am working on with the ActoNetwork, and with Kid Mercury's World. On a related note, check out this absolutely killer post from venture capitalist Paul Fisher, in which he talks about the new "advertising objects" that are being created. These ad objects are going to be built by world makers who are hacking and remixing open source social networks. Paul also notes that there isn't much of an opportunity for venture capital in this space, as it is dominated by agencies -- firms that are all about human capital and not scalable infrastructure assets. I agree -- but I don't think this is an end to scalability in this space, just an end to scalability based on infrastructure assets. I think there are ways to scale human labor (think bloggers who build communities), and that is a truly exciting frontier for Internet business.