Now that FanConcert is in the usable state that it's in, it's natural to want more out of it. I'm getting great feedback from users but ultimately, since I'm on a personal deadline of sorts, I need to get it down to:

"What sells? What has value?"

...with the close second "how do I receive people's money in return for this value?" which is also closely related to "how do I keep the site running without begging for donations or selling my organs?" and "how can I live off this site and avoid getting a 'real' job?".

Yes, it's all fun and games until someone loses a kidney. I'm going to try to lay out most of my priorities, strangely enough in no particular order. Some are badly needed, others are just harebrained ideas that I think FanConcert needs to be a success.

FanConcert's login code needs to be reworked, either with an update from the original author or a refactoring from me. It was very convenient to have this pre-made login system in the beginning but the login code in its current state has become a usability problem for FanConcert. Not good.

The payment system needs to be hooked up through a third party company that takes credit cards or other forms of payment and this must be hooked up through the FanConcert's login code. I'm not sure how these two will be connected just yet because I don't know how payment systems work. Investigation is definitely needed.

Ease of submission of data into FanConcert is important. I want to encourage people to submit new stuff and make it as easy as possible to submit the minimum amount of information. Then other people can come along later and add details by editing the object.

Ease of moderation is equally important, since a moderation to me is just a submission that agrees with an existing submission. The more people that agree with a submission, the more likely it is to be correct. On the flip side, ease of moderation will ensure that information the majority of people deem to be incorrect is removed from other users' view.

Once an object has been moderated users should see their mistakes so they can fix them. People make mistakes, it happens. Most of the time it's not malicious, so users will want to know when they made a typo, so they can go back and fix it. Fixing mistakes will improve the user's overall moderation score, which is used for moderation weighting.

Moderation weighting means that user's submissions will be weighted differently depending on a few factors. First, a user may be marked as an authority on an artist, venue, record label, etc. Then anything that user submits about that object will have a higher initial score than other users since it's coming straight from a credible source. This doesn't mean that these submissions can't be overruled, it will just take more users. The difficulty will be authenticating these official sources ... a basic example is verifying they have a [something]@artistname.com email address.

Secondly, each user's submissions will also be weighted based on their past submissions. If a person has a history of submitting things that other users deem are correct, then that user's future submissions will have more weight. The weight for every vote is also floating, meaning that as the user's moderation score improves, the weight for all of the user's existing votes will increase as well. These moderation measures are meant to root out malicious users.

Arbitrary attributes will allow more flexibility in FanConcert. When a user enters a new object, like an Artist, they can fill out "standard attributes" like the artist's name and country of origin but also add custom attributes for whatever imformation they like that isn't covered by the standard attributes, such as "year formed". With enough demand an arbitrary attribute could become a standard attribute.

Personal tagging will let users tag an object with any tag they like, such as "I attended this concert", "I have this album" or "this Artist sucks!". These custom tags can be used sort/subdivide large lists of objects, like bands you're interested in. Then you can use these smaller subdivided groups of objects in personalized pages and RSS feeds.

...and last but not least, my personal favourite: output templates, a subscriber feature. All of the data in FanConcert is arranged so that it can be easily rearranged and reformatted. Why not allow users to create their own personal output templates for this data? Then users can create their own RSS feeds, or any type of "output" feed actually, even their own HTML pages.

It would save me a lot of work, wouldn't it? Mostly because I'd let people share their output templates with other users. Paying users could use output templates to act as an API for some other application they connect to FanConcert. They pay for their subscription, and I allow a finite number of "reads" with their account and make sure multiple people aren't using it. Then other users can also subscribe to FanConcert, use that user's application and his FanConcert output templates.

FanConcert could also have a CDDB-like business model where the application's business pays FanConcert for a finite number of "queries" and the users of the program get "free" access and are none the wiser. For example: when you use iTunes, Apple pays CDDB to get CD track listings and you don't pay anything.

FanConcert in that context is a web service and the API is completely customizable instead of some restrictive RPC XML or something. I think this would be really neat for subscribers, what do you think?