Internet Marketing Blog

Let’s Be Friends: Part 2

Posted by peter on June 2, 2008 |

I wanted to revisit a post I made earlier about creating some sort of group or network which allows people (specifically IM’ers) to get in touch and do a collaborative project.

Having given it some more thought and chatted about it with some online and offline colleagues it’s clear that some people are excited by the thought and others are a lot more cautious. The downside is obviously that someone may not pull their weight, or some might do more than others, in which case how do you decide how to split the profits?

I thought I should elaborate a bit more on how I saw the whole concept working.

First off, I see this as a social network / freelancer type project. Everyone who signs up would have their skills for other people to see. For example, my skills are:

• Writing
• SEO
• Access to quality programmers on demand

Now, either someone could approach me, or I could approach someone and say, hey, are you interested in my project? Would projects be listed like on scriptlance? I don’t know. Maybe you could have some sort of status which says “available for projects” or “not available for projects”.

You could network with people who have similar skills or areas of interest as yourself to create the foundation for a product. For example two guys that were in to SEO could record an interview together and work together on an SEO home study guide (which I don’t think has ever been done, btw).

There are then loads of collaborative web tools, like gantt charts, brainstorming tools, task lists, to do lists, milestones, whiteboards etc. that people can use to do the project.

The idea of doing a collaborative project instead of outsourcing all the bits you don’t like doing or can’t do (like graphics for example) is that it could help keep you motivated and focused. I imagine an awful lot of people could make tens of thousands of dollars (like me for example) if only they would focus and concentrate on doing just one small part of the project.

Anyway, more musings from someone with more time than money on his hands