So I made this community Steem Think Tank to be a place to throw out ideas such as this one, but I probably should have done the VERY FIRST post about the community in the community, oh well. Check out that post to see what this community is all about.
Anyway, as communities develop and eventually make their way out of beta, I think that now more than ever, the idea of a customized frontend as a service could be extremely lucrative. Ideally I'd really like it if Steemit.com had a lot of visual customization features, but as time goes on and the content shared here gets more and more diverse I think catering to every possible layout that people might want becomes untenable.
I think there will be a huge opportunity for some smart peeps to come together and offer Communities customized frontends for different content types. Moving us into a more wordpressy situation where people can make condenser or nitrous forks and reskin them in a million different ways then sell those on an open digital marketplace.
This will of course open up more opportunity to monetize communities as each one of these can have its own ad revenue, it's own token, etc.
Of course Steem Engine is already doing this in a sort of phase one sort of way in that it's offering a separate frontend, but it's all the same frontend. Without getting too crazy into design I think it would be a safe bet to make a template for communities that are more about socialization, more about videos, and more about imagery.
Just taking those three foundations and building variants I think would add a lot of value. I've made some mock ups for different communities layouts, but this sort of thing is what I'm talking about. Also some of the view options from Steempeak are good examples of what might make for a good default layout for a very content specific community.(like mine, yes, I just want you all to make me shit, but other people could use it to 馃槂)
Anywho, that's that idea. I don't know how to build it but I'd pay good money for it. I'm guessing others would to. What do you think? Let me know in the comments!