I’m going to start experimenting with ads on Sympoze. I have two main motivations for this. First, Sympoze relies on a Digg-clone module that, as far as I can tell, is pretty much maintained by one (possibly two) heroic programmers. I’d like to be able to compensate them for future maintenance. I play around with this kind of stuff as a fun hobby. These guys are trying to do it for a living.

Second, I’d also like to see work continue on a few specific features in the Digg-clone. Often, in the open source community, you’ll have a bunch of people each throw in a little money and offer up a bounty for features they’d like to have developed. That’s actually how the external vote button came to be. So, a small bit of revenue would help me guide the direction of module development in a way that might be more beneficial to Sympoze.

I’m conflicted about this. Because I find advertisements to be, generally, pretty annoying. Not only are they a nuisance, but they’re usually hard on the eyes. I already put up one Google Adsense side bar banner over at Sympoze, and it just looks gross.

But if it can help make Sympoze better in the long run – It might be worth it.

P.S. While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about some of those features I’d like to see.

1. Shared Feed to Vote
I think John Basl recommended this once. Right now, I can have users use a shared feed page (e.g. Google Reader Shared Page) and have the entries imported as story submissions. It would be nice if sharing, an already submitted story, became a vote in your name.

2. Mobile Apps
I’d like to see some mobile apps for Sympoze. There are already open source mobile apps for other social bookmarking sites out there, so things wouldn’t have to start from scratch. A generic app that integrated with the Drigg-clone module, but could be skinned on the user end would be AWESOME. If I got some of the other Drupal users on board, I think we could make this happen.

As long as we’re dreaming big…Got any features you’d like to see?