I would ammend that to "$12k, a few weeks, and an incredibly powerful platform for self-publicizing his site."
As with most things Web 2.0, there's a catch-22 at the beginning; Nobody posts, so nobody visits, so nobody posts. Guy's PR ability to drive traffic to his site is certainly much more valuable than the idea or the technology.
Sure, any young hacker could have built a site like that for $12K and a few weeks...but that may not be enough to give it a similar chance for success.
I thought it would be amusing to go down the list one-by-one and make open-source clones of 'em, specifically made to scale using EC2 and S3 auto-magically.
Go for it! Competition is _always_ good! It forces people and companies to up their game. Customers are the ones who win in the end.
I was actually thinking of implementing something like Scribd (it's very simple with Adobe Flashpaper) but don't wanna get sued and deal with DMCA/lawyers. Scribd's full of pirated stuff... they must be getting a ton of DMCA takedowns.
That's interesting - how could you use FlashPaper in a server setting? Is it available for Linux? Would it be sufficient to have a single user license to serve the web?
I think he seems very bitter in his post. Also I think he wrong when he says why would it matter that its wordpress. He makes an analogy between oracle and mysql as well. I think it does , technical proficiency matters, if he is going to outsource his programming I see this not being successful.
Why? Bloglines outsourced quite a few things. Digg outsourced quite a bit of its early development...didn't seem to hurt it much. MySpace was outsourced development early on, too.
That's not to say I particularly like Truemors...the spamminess of it pretty much makes it worthless to my eyes, but it's not spammy because it was outsourced, but because of specific implementation decisions.
Let this be a challenge. What can you start with the same constraints?