When I first read about Krugle, I thought every web hosting company ought to offer an interface to its 1 billion+ lines of searchable, reusable code. Yahoo! has. And Microsoft. If you say you're interested in working with developers (as all of my web hosting friends do), why wouldn't you connect them with such a time saving resource?
The newly launched BuiltWith.com might be another neat addition to the forward-thinking web host's toolbox. As founder Gary Brewer tells ReadWriteWeb, his goal is to help developers make more informed decisions by finding out what web servers/frameworks/etc other sites are using.
As a point of reference, Jeff Huckaby, who's been working on a VBulletin optimization project, says he wishes VBulletin offers a "what works" knowledgebase. He thinks the availability of collective knowledge could be more appealing than any product itself. Users might switch just to take part in a community where members save each other from reinventing the wheel.
Don Dodge agrees that community is more powerful than technology, which is much easier to reproduce.
Stephen O'Grady, I think, says it best: biggest community wins. He switched from Movable Type to WordPress because WordPress has been more successful at growing its community, which resulted in more available themes/plugins/etc, which resulted in more people using WordPress...
So to D., who thinks "old school" web hosting + aggressive ad spending (even if you're losing out big time to click fraud) sounds like a good enough game plan, here's an alternative for you to consider :)
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