I see a lot of questions centred around social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and how it will affect forums. I also see a lot of people saying that we should focus on social networking for IP.Board to stay competitive. This crops up every few days. It’s regular enough for me to try and encapsulate my thoughts in a single easy-to-link-to blog entry.
Before I get into the real meat of the debate, let’s first take a look at social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
You’d be a fool to ignore the speed at which these sites have grown in popularity. I joined Facebook several years ago before the boom. Back then it was very US-centric and was literally a profile page with a few tools to communicate to other Facebook users. Twitter started life many years ago as “Twittr”; a simple service to allow remotely scattered developers working for a single company to keep up-to-date. Both of these sites have grown rapidly and evolved into hugely influential websites boasting trillions of page views and millions of users.
So, it’s natural to point to these sites and ask “Why can’t I have that?”.
The reason you can’t replicate Facebook on your own site is that forums are little islands of content. Your site is in a great and vast sea with many other islands all competing for the same tourism. Facebook and Twitter is a giant metropolis of users generating user-focused content. These users are well connected with new friends just a short click away.
The humble forum hasn’t changed much over the past decade. Sure, they look a bit cooler. They have a few more widgets and offer more interactivity but essentially they are the same as when I started hacking up BoardMaster ten long years ago. Back in the dark days of the internet forums were ‘bulletin boards’. Very simple programs in which you “logged on” and left a message. This evolved along with “listserv” another simple program to consolidate email conversations into a threaded discussion. The only real revolution came when Infopop (now amusingly named ‘Groupee’) created the flat view board that we’re all familiar with now.
The first question we should ask is why hasn’t the core functionality changed?
The answer is quite simple. The way we interact with forums hasn’t changed. Forums are content-centric by nature. This is a very important point to make. Very early bulletin boards cared little for the user apart from their email address or name so that one knew who authored the content. Think about the forums you regularly visit. Do you visit them to catch up with your buddies or do you visit them to join in a themed conversation? To get support on a product you own maybe? Or perhaps to catch up with the gossip after last nights X Factor? Whatever your reason, it’s almost certainly because of the content, not the members.
Forums haven’t changed because we still need strongly organised and categorised discussion. Facebook may have “discussion boards” on its group pages but it is a weak system. There have been a few stabs at changing forum software, but in most cases they are not successful because they miss the point.
I don’t wish to single out a single application, but Vanilla springs to mind. At first glance, it’s a nice clean board with minimal clutter that will surely appeal to many. But could you run a support community with that software? Can you imagine if you had five software products, how would you categorise the conversations? With Vanilla you couldn’t. And it’s the same with the Facebook discussion plug-in.
Successful forums have a purpose. I’ve seen hundreds of “My Chat Site” forums appear and vanish as quickly because they offer nothing unique. There are thousands of active forums that focus on a single interest, such as fitness, movies or cars. If these forums continue to market themselves correctly and generate a good deal of unique content each day they will be under no threat from Facebook or Twitter.
So, nothing’s changed in ten years?
Not quite. We, at IPS, have made a subtle change in our verbiage. We sell community building software, not forums. This is not just marketing mumbo-jumbo. It underlines that our software has features and tools to build a community. IP.Board is still content-centric but it has greatly expanded the amount of user-centric functionality. We have extended profiles, such as the user-photos, the about-me box, as well as blogs and gallery. These tools add value to your members and give them a secondary reason to come back to your island regularly.
So, why can’t I have a slice of Facebook for my Twilight fan site?
Facebook works because it’s a single site. If Facebook was downloadable software that you had to install then it wouldn’t work. You would need to create different log ins for each site and update each status update individually. Quite clearly that’s not going to set the world on fire.
Twitter works because you make a status update and it’s immediately available to millions of people who can click a button and follow me, or reply to me, or RT my tweet. If you had to copy the tweet to your own Twitter site and paste it, or you had to sign up to my Twitter site to reply, it wouldn’t work.
You can distill this into a simple statement: Facebook and Twitter is centred squarely on its members talking about themselves. A bewildering and expansive array of random subjects.
We, at IP.Board, could easily replicate Facebook’s tools and indeed we have started to see a few creep in, like status updates. But no matter how many “social networking” tools we add, I’m not going to join a Twilight Fan site just to update my status so I can tell its users about my day. Why would I? A Twilight Fan site is full of Twilight fans talking about Twilight. I have no interest in that, and they surely have no interest in me.
I’m sure many Twilight fans are interested in PHP coding, but you wouldn’t add a PHP coding forum to a Twilight fan site and expect it to generate hundreds of new members.
But Facebook is killing me and stealing all my users!
I don’t wish to be obtuse, but if Facebook really is stealing your users, then you need to take a good hard look at your forum and its place in the world. If you don’t have a strong theme or compelling content then your users won’t have a reason to come back and the few friendships that your users develop on your forum will be moved onto Facebook because Facebook is a much better at developing online friendships.
Take a look at any popular site. How about Idol Forums; a forum for American Idol fans. Could you run that 21,000,000 post community from Facebook or Twitter and have it continue to thrive? Of course not.
So you’re saying that IP.Board will eschew social networking as if its some kind of pariah?
Not at all. This is the problem with stating your point of view, it’s instantly assumed that you oppose the other. This is not true. I see value in adding secondary reasons to get your members to come back. Whether that’s to check their personal conversations, or to write up their blogs, or to add their holiday snaps to their gallery. This is what makes your forum a community.
IP.Board 3 already uses Facebook Connect to allow you to syphon off a good slice of Facebook traffic into your community. Don’t expect people to join up just to chat. But if you have a unique reason to visit, people will. Especially as you can effectively log right into the board with your Facebook account.
You can use Facebook and Twitter to generate traffic to your site. We have an official twitter account and an official Facebook page. We use both of these mediums to drive traffic back to our site.
Keep marketing yourself well, compliment your site with social networking, keep your members happy and generating good content and you will continue to thrive.
I’ll leave you with this final thought, Jerry Springer style: If social networking is an unstoppable juggernaut that will devour the forum format then why have forward thinking companies such as Vodafone and O’Reilly just commissioned new communities built with IP.Board?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent read Matt. I concur with all of your points and would add that we, as community owners, should view the “threat” from SM as just additional enhancements to our communities…very much like what IPS has already done or is doing with IP Board.
In the fifteen years I’ve been working with and using forums many things have come and gone.
The use of instant messaging, free email accounts, social networking sites.
The internet moves in phases from fad to fad but one thing has remained consistent in that time and that’s the use of forums. Social networking is a very personal on the whole and identifies you almost to the point of giving out your name, address and vital statistics if one wanted to look hard enough.
The one thing forums can give you is the freedom to be anonymous and free thinking without the need to worry about what others think. That does have its pros and cons obviously.
The other is the sheer simplicity of it all… forums are the easiest form of discussion online and they always will be.
A forum is a discussion centre based on a unique interest/niche. It has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter. I go to your forum because I want to find out how I could tune my plasma TV, for example. Having my last twitter message in the profile should suffice, you can follow me or visit my blog if you want to know more about myself.
Very well said Matt. Great post.
Thanks for the feedback. We do get asked quite often how we’re going to respond to the the “threat” from Facebook or how were going to remain competitive with Twitter.
Those sites are not the enemy but they can be powerful allies.
Let’s forget about Twitter and Facebook now and think where Internet came in the last 15 years.
Humankind invented that thing called Internet to share content across the world. As since Internet’s main aim is to share the content you own, people tried to find the best way to do this. First, there were only static websites. Then, we figured out it was possible to update the content of that website dynamically. This is where we built our first Content Management Systems. They were awesome at that time but we weren’t able to discuss about those contents. So we invented something called Bulletin Board. It was both able to share the content we have and discuss about it. It was huge and the bulletin board market got bigger and bigger over the years. Then someone said, “Hey, I built something called Blog which is something between a Bulletin Board and a CMS. Wanna check it out?” and we had our first blog. It was a huge success also, but it was hard to follow many of them even if you use their RSS feeds. Then, we had Blog Communities or Community Blogs. It was also going pretty well, but most of the people didn’t have time to read really long posts. That’s where MicroBlogging came from. Easy to follow and interact. And the best MicroBlogging service is Twitter. That’s why Facebook is trying to copy everything Twitter has and kill it. Facebook is just a big soup that has everything in it. It has Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, FriendFeed and more. Facebook has lots of functionalities, yes, but it’s only good at interacting users with each other. Other than that, it’s not possible for Facebook to kill the websites it copies.
So, when you look at the all the things I wrote above, the main trend is sharing the content as quick and in a short form as possible on a big network. Nowadays it’s possible to do this partially using different websites but not as a whole. Bulletin Boards are really lucky in this situation. They definitely will survive whatever the trend is, just like they did in the last 15 years. And they’re also the closest platforms to catch the main trend I’ve stated above.
As a coder and a huge fan of IP.Board, I can full-heartedly say that, IP.Board is again the best bulletin board script when it comes to social networking. And I’m sure it will take this to the next level with the upcoming release of IP.Blog. Even though IP.Gallery still needs a few little touches, it’s doing pretty well lately. And with the release of IP.Content, IP.Board closed its need of an API and/or a CMS. Long story short, IPS is coming along pretty well right now to the social networking market.
I think, communities that have similar contents should get together, of build a connection between them (sharing posts and users). Otherwise, they won’t have any chance int the future. Look at the Wikipedia, it’s the biggest content source on the Internet and it’s dying now.
Let’s wait and see…
Amtsgericht Bad Hersfeld Aktenzeichen: HRB 2126 Bekannt gemacht am: 18.02.2010 12:00 Uhr
Veröffentlichungen des Amtsgerichts Bad Hersfeld In () gesetzte Angaben der Anschrift und des Geschäftszweiges erfolgen ohne Gewähr.
Löschungen von Amts wegen
30.12.2009
Florian Grotehans Vermögensverwaltungs-GmbH, Bad Hersfeld, (Am Baumgarten 12, 36251 Bad Hersfeld).
Die Gesellschaft ist gemäß § 394 Absatz 1 FamFG [b]wegen Vermögenslosigkeit[/b] von Amts wegen gelöscht.
Florian Grotehans Vermögensverwaltungs GmbH vermögenslos!
Als Handwerk (von mhd. hant-werc, eine Lehnübersetzung zu lat. opus manuum und grch. ?e???????a (cheirurgia)) werden zahlreiche gewerbliche Tätigkeiten bezeichnet, die Produkte meist auf Bestellung fertigen oder Dienstleistungen auf Nachfrage erbringen. Der Begriff bezeichnet auch den gesamten Berufsstand. Die handwerkliche Tätigkeit steht der industriellen Massenproduktion gegenüber. Das handwerkliche Gewerbe wird in Deutschland verbindlich durch die Handwerksordnung geregelt.
In der weitgehend bäuerlich geprägten Welt des frühen Mittelalters spielten die sich später spezialisierenden Handwerkstätigkeiten wie die Verarbeitung von Nahrungsmitteln, die Herstellung von Textilien oder das Fertigen von Geräten und Bauten aus Holz noch eine verschwindend geringe Rolle gegenüber der häuslichen Eigenproduktion. Spezielle Arbeitstechniken, wie Bronzeguss, Malerei und Bildhauerei waren an Klöster gebunden. Erst im Hochmittelalter und mit der Städtebildung verlagerte sich der Schwerpunkt in urbane Zentren. Die hergestellten Waren werden auf Märkten feilgeboten oder in Werkstätten und Läden ausgestellt und verkauft. Eine Ausnahmerolle spielen Baumeister und Steinhauer, die, von einer (Kirchen-) Bauhütte zur nächsten ziehend, über territoriale Grenzen hinweg Fertigkeiten, Innovationen und Stilentwicklungen verbreiten.