Comments on: Online Community Platforms

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:46:29 +0000

No, I’ve never heard of that one before. It certainly looks promising, but honestly I’ve never seen a site using that platform before.

By: geekening

geekening — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:19:02 +0000

Have you given things like Dolphin (http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/) a try? Those Boonex folks have a huge community growing.

Thanks for the follow on Twitter, by the way.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:39:16 +0000

Thanks, I’ll check those out.

By: Uncle MythMan

Uncle MythMan — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:59:28 +0000

I’m not an administrator of any social-network (that I know of … lol), but there has been a string of Social-Nets offering ’splitting of ad-revenue’ of late (Yuwie.com, MyGizmoz.com, MyVieWin.com, BlackPlanet.com, myLot.com, etc.) You might check out some of those, see if their admin have any advice.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:41:18 +0000

Mark, I’d love to have a look at your site that’s running on EE & vB. Thanks for the comments.

By: mncahill

mncahill — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:36:34 +0000

Ning wll drive you nuts. EE doesn’t remove the need for vBulletin on large sites, I have one that runs both.

Paisley: why would we build a site that is going to use only external services – that would be impossible to monetize. Also, I find divorcing commenting from the content, ala a disqus type solution, provides and disjointed discussion.

Dean: if traffic numbers come from Alexa, run, don’t walk. At the very least, traffic numbers should come from Google Analytics.

PEter: I see Twitter as a possible shout box client, using perhaps a hashtag. As the categorization improves (tweetdeck is coming a long way) we can start to funnel the content into silos. Since we can find ways to funnel it, we can also funnel it into rss which means we can use it on a site. But I see the two as fundamentally different. Forums with long form threaded discussions bring an entirely different value,

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:23:44 +0000

Thanks for the comment paisley. I do wonder how far things like Twitter are going to go. I work with a lot of older people in my communities, for example, and a lot of them have enough trouble figuring out how to use a basic bulletin board. I think there will be a lot more trouble getting widespread acceptance to things like Twitter and Mobile IM. The first wave of adopters who are on Twitter now are just as likely to be moved onto something else by the time it’s getting ready to go mainstream.

By: paisley

paisley — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:13:02 +0000

External IM is the wave of the future, think Mobile IM, text, community, GPS + Gtalk + Twitter + Digg, etc..

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:20:15 +0000

Hi Dean, thanks for the comment. Measuring traffic is a whole other animal. It’s often impossible to ‘prove’ to someone the validity of your traffic without giving away the keys, so to speak. In other words, if someone shows you where and how the traffic comes, what stops you from going out and doing it yourself. Having said that, some tools like Alexa can give rough estimates of traffic that are sometimes useful. But, like you, I have not found any solution that I find totally satisfactory. For my own in-house purposes I use Google Analytics.

By: dean guadagni

dean guadagni — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:46:44 +0000

Peter,

Thanks for the follow on twitter! I love what you are writing about here. I am especially interested in analytic tools that determine a website or blog’s traffic. It is very problematic.

So many SEO or Social Media consultants claim to have traffic and there is no way to verify. The Alexa rankings and Quantcast information can be misleading. Are there any other tools to analyze and investigate these speaker’s claims?

Thanks so much!

dean