Are there any entrepreneurial Drupal developers and designers who would like to join me in developing www.usedcarfeed.net?
What I am trying to do is to create an XML feed of all used cars for sale. Any website would be free to tap into the feed and can use the data however they like. They could create mashups, experiment with new user interfaces and find all sorts of novel ways of drilling through the data. The benefits for such sites would be that they don’t need to resource the data from scratch. It is already available for them. If they use Drupal then they can also benefit from the patterns (http://drupal.org/project/patterns) I am developing which allow them to set up a used car showroom from a bare-bones Drupal installation.
Dealers would also benefit from this in that their stock would be displayed across many interesting websites without them having to spend a fortune in time and money trying to promote their cars across the net. In exchange for this advertising dealers would pay a £20 per month subscription fee. This money will go to whomever contracts the dealer to the feed and sets them up with a microsite for capturing their data. I have already developed a pattern for creating such a microsite.
Drupal developers who set up these microsites will share the data with each other to form a common Feed which sites can query and tap into.
I don’t want to turn usedcarfeed.net into a company. I would rather follow the model of Drupal itself which means that all parties would share and maintain a common codebase and data but each would be their own commercial entity.
If this sounds interesting and you want to have a further chat about it, please PM me.
Anyone's business
Hi Shawn S
Interesting idea, but not a business opportunity in the suggested form, as far as im concerned.
However, I would be willing and interested in partnering (purely in a Drupal Community sense) to help you, if I am able to, with this project.
Get in touch if you feel it would be useful.
Cliff