Franchised web apps

It's time for another free-for-the-implementing business idea. This one: web site franchises.

Take the software that runs flickr or reddit or any of a thousand other things, and package it so it can be installed on a server farm elsewhere and customized. The example of reddit is perhaps most compelling to me as regards customization, because it's easy to see that the format of the software is so independent of its content, yet the social way reddit functions could be adapted to other groups of people. Right now it would be hard to grow a home improvement user base on reddit because of the slant of the existing user base. But somebody could buy a home improvement reddit franchise and start it up. This would be a way for the creators of a web application to get into markets they know little about.

I can think of two possible drawbacks for franchising a given web application. The first drawback is the financial aspect. If the application is having problems turning a profit with the existing international user base, fragmenting it would not be an option. There would have to be the potential for customizing the application in a way that adds value. The second potential drawback is the task of packaging the web application for replication. In most cases, this would be a non-trivial development cost. Designing 3D buttons and Javascript animations is fun and can be taken to show-and-tell, writing install scripts can be a tedious and under-appreciated chore.

Another angle to the web app franchise idea is some things may be salable to large corporations and government agencies for internal use without concerns about compromising confidential information over public networks.

As with most (all) of my ideas posted here, I expect this one is so good it was done long ago and I just now finally forgot enough of its origins that I think it's new. Please correct me. If I happen to be wrong, and you make some real money with this idea, I'd appreciate a link back to this blog, with due credit: "Thanks to JFKBits, whoever or whatever that is" would be fine.

CodeCodex

Today at DZone.com I ran across the CodeCodex which could subsume the Software Provenance Database. The latter is (will be?) a place to store code snippets that help your program figure out "where am I?". The idea of CodeCodex is simply to be a repository of any small bit of useful code, from sorting implementations to CSV import code, in any language.

Google still does a reasonable job at finding existing code of course, and for things like these they're usually in the format of articles with some good explanatory text. CodeCodex uses a Wiki so the code can also be presented as an article, and can include implementations in multiple languages. Anyone can contribute, refine, and discuss once they land on the page.

This thing has been submitted to Digg (twice) and reddit within the past year, but I hadn't heard anything about it before.