The problem with even the most basic of web apps is that it takes a LONG time to bring them to market.
The Problem
You have to design what the web page looks like, you have to put that website somewhere on the internet that can handle a bunch of traffic (e.g., Heroku), write the code that drives the designs that were just made. This is for both how it looks and behaves on the website, called front-end development in languages like HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and the technology that powers the data storage, computation, and integration, called back-end development using languages like node.js/mongodb or PHP and MySQL.
For even the most experienced developers who can do all 3 of those things (design, front-end and back-end development) it still takes an intense 24 hours to put up a simple site like Facto.me. That’s just ridiculous, especially since we’re in 2011 and walking around with computers in our pockets.
The Solution
Legos make it easy to build physical objects. Why doesn’t someone build a set of Legos for building web applications, making it easy for normal people to make a simple web app, sort of like how Shopify makes online storefronts easy.
Keep it simple in the beginning, like a standard login system that hooks up to Facebook and Twitter’s oAuth logins and has pre-set databases. You can drag and drop widgets, text, video layouts, and other dynamic items like forms. You could select a set of API “plugins” that you can mashup like Instagram, Foursquare, and Twilio. For the developers, you could maybe select between 2 or 3 different stacks (LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Node.js/Express/MongoDB, etc). And the entire thing is already hosted on a scalable server so people don’t have to worry about a ton of traffic.
Imagine creating a web app like http://about.me without knowing how to code. Now that’s powerful…
The Next Level
Create a mobile version just by flipping a switch.
