Find a way to make money on the library
klinker41 opened this issue · comments
This will work best if there are a lot of apps using it, because then our server can index more articles. When the article is indexed, we can respond way faster than any normal web site would be able to since the responses are small and we don't have to load images, ads, etc right off the bat, just text.
So, to get the highest number of developers using it, it has to work well and it has to be free for them to use, even if the server is costing us money each month.
My idea is to build a pocket-like app for reading articles later. Sharing the URL to the app would kick off the preloading and caching process so that we could display it offline later. The app itself would be extremely simple since the majority of the logic would be coming from the library. All the app would need to do is accept links from sharing and create a list view to manage all of the links that you currently have (deleting an item from that list should delete it from the cache).
To build onto this later, we could add a scoring system to the backend based on the number of hits that each article gets and a simple regression over time. We could then grab the trending articles for that day and display them in a discovery section. Again, this would work best with the most number of apps using the library.
This could also include a separate back end that supports user accounts and syncing between all of your devices. It could be a rails API very similar to Pulse's.
This could also work well with #14, helping you keep track of other content as well.
Closing this for now, it is on my roadmap for later, but don't have time right now to create a full new app.