Don’t reinvent the wheel.

I’m in a industry where I occasionally deal with a lot of people and a lot of businesses and I’ve noticed quite an interesting trend. Now, I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed this, but I’m probably one of the few to actually blog about it.

I have had many people request for me to create “the next MySpace”, in fact, a lot of people think they have some great idea that will make their site take off and become number one. Like such ground breaking ideas as “YouTube plus MySpace” or “Facebook plus CNN” (and yes, those explinations are actually more detailed than ones I’ve received). But people have very little idea what kind of work has to go into a site like that.

People think that you just can hit a few keystrokes and have something ready in a week. In fact, I’ve had plenty of people request for a “YouTube plus MySpace” and ask for it to be up within a week. They usually don’t know a whole lot, but they do know they want it to be built from the ground up and they want full rights for it. Oh, did I mention that most people want to pay only a couple thousand dollars for this service (like $3,000 or less) and that is if they don’t offer you some “50/50 split”

50/50 split? For what? For me doing all the work and you paying some $7 a month host? Please, you know nothing about bandwidth consumption or scaling code so it can work with 10,000+ users. They just want it now, now, now and for a fraction of what your time is worth. Besides, if it was so simple, wouldn’t there already be a million of these sites out there already?

Well, scratch that, there are a million of these little sites out there and if you look at them you can usually tell exactly what they paid for them. You can spot those PHPFox sites and you can spot those quickly coded sites. My point is that you will get what you pay for. If you pay $3,000 for a site and want it up in a week, you’re going to get exactly that. A site that’ll have plenty of security holes and that’ll scale face first on the ground.

Now I’ve said all that just so I can say this. People, please, don’t reinvent the wheel. You don’t have to be the next MySpace or the next Facebook to make money, all you have to do is jump on the bandwagon. Both of the sites I just mentioned have APIs so you can make applications that their users can use. In fact, out of all the traffic I get from my sites, most of my traffic comes from Facebook and MySpace applications that I’ve created.

Both those sites have such huge penetration right now, so it’s fairly simple to piggyback on their success. But, just like with anything else, you have to make sure you keep with the times. So if the “next MySpace” does roll around from some kid in India who made it for $6.50 and had it done in a week, you can be prepared.

Hopefully I haven’t alienated any of you, but instead, enlightened you.