Thinking about message boards
This is about the third Bijan post I have re-blogged recently. I hope he realizes it’s a case of parallel worlds and that I am not merely Tumblr-stalking him.
Forums/messaging/managing large volumes of content has been on my mind a lot lately. My bike racing team produces loads of it. A combination of Yahoo list and forum manage it poorly.
The email list gets overwhelming really fast, and forums silo content so much it is hard even to see what’s new, never mind determine whether I want to read it. My earlier comments on the subject are on a Venture Beat post here: http://tinyurl.com/5uwbux
My wish list is this:
1) A FriendFeed “Rooms”-like place where I can import feeds *and* the feeds show up in full, original format. Complete blog posts, photos, tweets, etc.
1.5) As I think about it, Tumblr is a half-decent model as well because people can auto-feed content from outside blogs, and people who don’t have outside blogs can post directly. Hmm, I’m going to test this out.
2) Disqus-linked comments, ideally to simultaneously comment back to the original post. Comments are inline with the posts like on FF currently.
3) Commented-on posts are sticky and stay at the top of the list. I really think this alone would help HUGELY to separate the “hot” topics from the one-shot posts.
There are a number of message boards that I use quite a bit as my goto source of information. Mostly they are based on some of my personal passions around photography, audio/video & apple computers.
For photography I goto dpreview
For audio & video info, it’s gotta be AVS
And for apple related questions it’s still Apple’s very own forums.
These message boards are alive and thriving with tons of smart people that are motivated by passion and a sense of community.
At the same time, most message boards have a dated user interface, poor search and notification & messaging systems that are lame at best. Some are getting better but many seem stuck. Even the more recent ones at Yahoo groups or facebook groups don’t do it for me. They just don’t seem to have the same sense of identity for these groups in my experience.
Online communities continue to gain speed and size though and that’s the key thing to pay attention to. But they need more applications, tools & services. They should start twittering together, searching together, shopping together, playing together and learning together.
And that’s just a start.
