roy

Jennhlin asked me today if I had a deep yearning to be incredibly "successful;" if I wanted to change people's lives, make lots of money, etc. The simple answer, is of course, a "yes." However, I made a note that in the case of MySpace, if I were in Tom's shoes, I would probably not be incredibly happy. I'm not only interested in financial windfall - I think one of the worst things in our society is the overriding importance we place on financial wealth. If I built a site that was a huge commercial success but really didn't benefit society in any way, I probably wouldn't view it as a success (even if it had a $560mil price tag associated with it). What's most important to me is that I build a tool that is successful, but also benefits and helps makes people lives easier/better.

Whenever you start any type of project, it helps to have an underlying philosophical mantra to help guide the growth of the site. When in doubt, you can always refer back to your original intentions and make your decisions like that.

Fuunk is very much philosophically-driven. This, obviously, does not solve the problem of "How do you monetize this site so it can support itself?" A site that can't support itself financially and folds is of no help to anybody at all. I'll write more on the financial aspects of Fuunk in the future, but for the time being, let me explain the philosophies that drive Fuunk.

• Fuunk's purpose is to make the lives of its users easier without costing them a single cent. We want to do everything we can to simplify the process of managing your courseload. We give you the information, tools, everything... free.
• Information should be free (nobody owns information). I'll save my DRM-rant for later, but in general, tools and information should be free. All the critical information on Fuunk (professor information, class data, etc.) will always remain free. We have no intention of doing what PickAProf did and start charging users a fee to access content. Getting users to contribute free information regarding professors, then charging for that information is flat-out WRONG.
• Allow access to the data. This is related, but I will (hopefully) get around to allowing all data to be available in OPML (schedules), RSS (professor comments), and FOAF (friends information) formats. I'll also create a REST-based API for people who want to access this information. Furthermore, once I can figure out a good way to automate the process, I want to dump all the professor/class information and just let people download the database files so they can create their own site.
• Don't succumb to fads. Fuunk is not FaceBook. I will be actively resisting any attempts to turn Fuunk into Facebook... this basically means that any feature we add, unless it adds value to the process of course management, will not be supported. In essence, we're building a very complex tool, but we want to keep a very narrow scope on what we focus on.
• Humanize the user experience. I haven't yet set up a site blog yet, but I want to make the whole user experience in contacting us as personal as possible. I haven't written much about the Fuunk experience yet, but there's so much to write about (technically and the backstory).

Next post: technical stuff about Fuunk :)