Spommentary is the first of a series of ‘hobby projects’ that I’m building in my spare time. These projects are really huge gambles done at little cost. The idea is to keep costs as low as possible until there seems to be some real life in the projects. The rationale being that if you can do a relatively decent job of designing an interface and prototyping an application, you can get it developed at a very low cost and host it for virtually nothing. If people then like your application concept and the interface you can then invest in a more formal model for the potential business.
I started spommentary.co.uk during 2008 trying to build a live feed of sports information that anybody can contribute to. Right now it is still in early stages and I’m releasing information about it bit-by-bit. There are a few things I’d like to further iterate but right now it is usable and is something I’m contributing to as often as I can – I see this more of a hobby than a business challenge right now – though of course I’d like to get others contributing to it.
The purpose of the project is that people can get live streams of sports information (provided by other people – crowdsourced sports commentary if you like). Right now it is run very simply with almost no monthly costs apart from hosting, the idea is to iterate the site more if it becomes sufficiently popular (say a few hundred posts a month).
I’m always looking for feedback on these ideas and if you have any just drop me an email or leave a comment here.