Introduction

Over the last couple of years Social Networks and blogging tools like Word Press, Movable Type, and Blogger have made it extremely easy for anybody to become a publisher or a content creator on the internet. The result has been a mass democritization of online media. Individuals like Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge can rise to the heights of influence normally reserved for major media conglomerates.  A similar shift is occurring in the area of application and service development. Without knowing a single line of code non-technically skilled people can use services like Iceberg (geticeberg.com), Ning (ning.com), and open-source CMS's like Drupal and Joomla to quickly create fully featured applications, social networks, and online stores with all the features of an Amazon.com.

Coupled with the emergence of Google's new browser (Chrome) and the announcement that Google is also developing an operating system specifically optimized for using internet applications seems to infer that in the near future people won't develop programs (or business models) for Windows or Mac users but for Internet users, and EVERYBODY will be a developer.  Now that anyone can create their own social networks, websites, and applications what sort of sites, applications and networks are they creating and why? How do the business behind these “do it yourself” programs make money? Can the roots of his trend be found in the Open Source Movement that has produced much of the web’s innovation? Where is it going?

In this paper we will examine the different firms that are attempting to make a living by providing people and organizations the ability to create their own social networks, web sites, and full blown applications. We'll look at what firms are emerging as leaders in this field, what it means for the software industry as a whole, how all of these firms are making money, and how the Open Source Movement has informed this trend and what Open Source development means for the future.