[Updated 4-14-09]

We at SnapDragon have made our first WordPress plugin. It’s only a tiny one: it adds a button to the administration screen that displays one’s Harvest account within the WordPress interface. You can find the plugin at the WordPress.org repository here.

Harvest is very useful time tracking tool that we’ve just started using. Like basecamp (which we also use), it’s an enterprise-oriented Web application that makes its services available on a subscription model. We recently wrote (quite positively) about Squarespace, a Web publishing and content management system that also sells its services (along with hosting) for money.

Selling services for money should probably be the rule rather than the exception. It is, in fact, everywhere except the Web. Certainly some companies have managed to turn a profit selling advertisements (Google) and certainly some companies have managed to convince people to just give them money (Twitter) but selling a service seems like a much more stable business model, regardless of how famous some of the exceptions might be.

And then there are open source projects like WordPress where users contribute and cooperate to make a freely available product better. We’ve explained why we are fans of WordPress before and the community behind it is no small part of its appeal.

And now we are part of that community (if only a small one) by virtue of the plugin we contributed. We helped make WordPress (a little bit) better and more useful—for us as well as for others with similar needs. We gave WordPress back a little tiny bit of value while we continue to enjoy a much larger amount of value generated from the community as a whole.

But here’s the interesting thing: we also gave Harvest a little tiny bit of value. Harvest is not ever so slightly more appealing a tool. Maybe someday someone considers using Harvest but wants to know if he or she could easily access it from within their WordPress administration screen. That person searches and finds our plugin and so decides that they will use Harvest.

Admittedly, it’s not all that likely that our little tiny plugin is going to be the deciding factor for too many potential Harvest users. But, as is often true on the Web, 1) it’s the cases at the margin that matter and 2) not an individual instance of an effect, but the sum of multiple varied instances that matter. To put it another way: the existience of opportunities for open source contribution and enthusiasm for improving a useful paid service mean that members of a dedicated user base can autonomously increase the value of that service, further widening its appeal.

That’s an interesting situation.