I have been hesitant to pitch a social news aggregation service to clients because they’re a lot trickier to program and maintain than they look. There’s a lot more to it than voting up and down stories; a good algorithm is mandatory, and so is a solid, threaded discussion system (well, Digg survived a long time with a crappy one but they’re finally in the game with their new one).
But now, I’m ready for clients to say, “give me one Reddit to go, please.”
Reddit has gone open source! That means all the code necessary to re-create Reddit is free and available for anyone to download. Of course, you need to resolve a fair amount of dependencies first so it’s not like flipping a switch, but this is a great start. TechCrunch has already unleashed their reddit-clone (within 12 hours of the announcement!): TechNews.
The open source culture is practically a religion on the internet because freely shared source code (versus jealously guarded “closed source” code) is what the web is based upon. Open source gives everybody equal footing and culls the collective wisdom of the community to crowd-source great things, like the Firefox web browser. Don’t like the way the new Firefox 3 behaves? Download the source code and make your own version.
What makes Reddit great is the community that sustains it, but now you can skip some of the coding and jump straight into community-building. I’m hoping a client will have a need for social news aggregation so I can pitch building our own reddit clone. Half the work’s already done!