but they didn't create the myspace community, they jumped in the phase when they were already hiring senior level execs(the only early guy, is on the tech side, and joined it at 300,000 users), and it's quiet different growing a community from a few million users compared to growing a community from 0. The hardest phase of any company, are those first 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 users. After that 100,000 user mark, as long as your site is viral enough(like myspace), you'll continue growing at XX,XXX users per week.
and it's not really them, that I'm talking about, I'm talking about their future users, the admins, who'll be implementing this to start their own forums. Those are the guys that will have a huge churn rate, that will use the system for 1-2 weeks, before shutting the site down, due to lack of users.
And yes I use plenty of forums, message boards are the only avenue that you can use just for discussion. Sure there are other things that focus on something else and allow discussion(i.e. HN, where the key goal is submitting articles), but if you want to discuss something you gotta hit up those outdated forums. The comments in blogs etc, are really not the same as an actual discussion on forums. I've read a 10,000 posts forum thread. I've never read a blog post that had more than 50 comments, since there is no way to hold a discussion, just a bunch of +1 comments.
The api thing excites you as a techy, but almost all of the forums are run by fans. Camaro fans, harry porter fans, excersize fans, the words API are like magic to them, they mean nothing.
Yeah it's still up in the air, and can go either way, but I just don't see any mass adoption or mass revenue in their future. Any business that relies on their users starting communities, has a very long road ahead of them. Granted their goal is probably just scale(like ning), where they have a few million communities, but each with 5-10 people.
and it's not really them, that I'm talking about, I'm talking about their future users, the admins, who'll be implementing this to start their own forums. Those are the guys that will have a huge churn rate, that will use the system for 1-2 weeks, before shutting the site down, due to lack of users.
And yes I use plenty of forums, message boards are the only avenue that you can use just for discussion. Sure there are other things that focus on something else and allow discussion(i.e. HN, where the key goal is submitting articles), but if you want to discuss something you gotta hit up those outdated forums. The comments in blogs etc, are really not the same as an actual discussion on forums. I've read a 10,000 posts forum thread. I've never read a blog post that had more than 50 comments, since there is no way to hold a discussion, just a bunch of +1 comments.
The api thing excites you as a techy, but almost all of the forums are run by fans. Camaro fans, harry porter fans, excersize fans, the words API are like magic to them, they mean nothing.
Yeah it's still up in the air, and can go either way, but I just don't see any mass adoption or mass revenue in their future. Any business that relies on their users starting communities, has a very long road ahead of them. Granted their goal is probably just scale(like ning), where they have a few million communities, but each with 5-10 people.