So what to do with locidesktop.com? It's a desktop-like website bookmarking tool – if you haven't seen it, take a quick look at this example desktop.
I built Loci Desktop a few months ago and promoted it on a few geek sites. It's been running ever since, with no maintenance from myself, happily serving up start pages to a small number of regular users. There was a buzz when I promoted it, people were largely impressed, some were indifferent, but few ended up using it regularly. So now I'm left with a quandary.
I could try and promote it. But to what end? It's not like I need a certain number of visitors to cover the hosting. I'm using the same VPS as I am for my blog, and I designed Locidesktop to be ultra-low bandwidth anyway – so it effectively costs me nothing to run.
One option would be to sell the entire site outright, as the domain and technology rights. But there is currently no way of monetizing it and I doubt anyone would be interested as a commercial venture.
I could try and license it as a b2b service. A few people have commented that it would be a useful intranet service. I'm not sure about this, but it sounds plausible.
Alternatively, I could give back to the Django community and release it as open source, which I imagine would be the popular thing to do. Money isn't my primary motivator (a close second perhaps), so I wouldn't be averse to doing this. Thing is though, it would require work on my part to document it and maintain it, and I have other open source projects I would prefer to concentrate on. But I can't deny that it would be cool to see Locidesktop sites popping up over the interwebs.
Finally, I could just leave it as is. I'm pleased with how it turned out, and I have a few loyal users. Maybe I should just be satisfied.
Any options I haven't considered? Leave a comment…
10 Responses to "What to do with Locidesktop?"
Why don't you make it a donate software? If you earn like $100 you develop a new feature or something like that.
I'm for open sourcing it! github and see what others fork it to be.
I tried it and it is definitely cool. I hope you open source it but either way nice job !
I don't think monetizing it should be your first worry. If it works well, if its a nice product, you will eventually get users & then find many creative ways to monetize it. Sponsored backgrounds come to mind immediately. but there are many ways. I would release an opensource version for people to roll out on their own servers, but also keep the webapp if its not too much to maintain.
i'm a django developer but i also dabble in domaining and other ways of monetizing websites, if you need any help i'll be glad to.
Cool idea and excellent work! It can be used in other ways, I mean desktop of gathered data so I agree with the rest.
BTW,
how do you add backgrounds like the django desktop you created? is this a feature you've aded to the app already or a special case with the django desktop.
another good features would be a share/like desktop button, thatn when clicked it can show up on your list of desktops. Like the django one, i would like that one on my list of desktops. for e.g
this is also where monetized sponsored desktops can come in :-)
Israel, there are hooks in the Desktop model where you can add custom CSS. But no front-end interface at the moment.
I wanted to add some social features, but never quite got round to it!
Will,
if you decide to take the project further and need some help on it like on the social features, let me know. I"m willing and able as i think you could take it further with a few added features.
I love the idea of locidesktop, and even more the minimal UI. Hope you'll keep it up!
Hi Will,
I know that my college has spent thousands building a dreadful system called “Portal” that is incredibly weighty and unreliable to do exactly what you've done here all light and whizzy. Bespoke Intranets maybe?