Mahalo's open platform inspires developers… now how can we make them money?
Contrary to what some folks might assume, we are very open with our platform. We haven’t published our API yet (i mean, we’re in month three!), but when folks ping us and ask us to play we get super involved with them and help them any way we can.
1. Today I got a ping about this super cool 1.0 iGoogle widget.
2. Sean did this widget for bloggers recently… very cool. Again, building off our recent changes, new pages, top pages RSS feeds.
3. Brandon built a 1.0 Facebook Mahalo application which puts Mahalo on your pages… good start, interested to see where they take this. 
4. Coding Robots did a Mac dashboard widget… very sexy and clean. 
I think most of what we’ve done so far was powered by RSS (a wonderful technology), and I think our next wave of inspired applications will be driven by our OPML plans (another wonderful technology).
Not suer exactly how to enable developers to make money from doing this stuff other than:
- a) Maybe hiring them to work with us on future projects (paying people, crazy I know)
- b) Thanking them across 10 different blogs and social networks to tens of thousands of people.
- c) Giving them the ability to use our content/platform commercially… if they do have thoughts on this they can always talk to me any time.
I’m open to any and all discussions… as I’ve always been.
I was thinking of maybe running a developer contest with some very cool prizes (i.e. like an iMac, iPhone, TechCrunch 20 ticket, etc). Not cheap stuff, but real cool items. Not sure if developers feel like those contests are exploitive or fun (I am, obviously, not a developer so I don’t want to presume one or the other).
[ Note: If I missed any applications here let me know... jason at mahalo dot com ]
