Microforums will make real time community discussion easy.
As a longtime forum denizen, I have a few issues with community forums. They are often used for the kind of banter that needs only a line or two. "Anyone had the 1989 Haut-Brion?" or "How do I boot Windows in safe mode?" are typical. In the thread that follows, untrimmed quotes, non-sequitor answers, and long-winded useless opinions often follow. This was great fun in the days when we used 14kbps modems, LOL, and had an available attention glut. Today, only people with serious time on their hands can really do this, and only in one or two places, probably. We need to streamline our forum activities, not to go faster but to give more and get more out of them.
In the last year, the tools have been emerging to build
microforums: vertical instances of what are basically improved chat rooms. Here are a few succinct reasons why you will like using a microforum. Here's some background from Ars Technica who
wrote this in July, 2008.
So many ways to post and get answers.
If you're into the cellphone thing, SMS and/or email keeps you in the loop in near real time. If you want a sleeker client, there are several available. Twhirl works with Twitter but also can be used with
laconica. As the open source instances expand, we can expect a lot more possible ways to send and receive updates.
Concise is nice.
The arbitrary limit of SMS has pretty much limited these micro sites to 140 characters with the exception of the non-open source
Yammer. I still use text email so I don't care much for all the file and photo adds, prefering them as links, but
OpenMicroBlogger extends the microforum model to add links and images.
Presence.
These new microforums are a sort of community instance of the age old IM. You can have AIM or Yahoo or Windows Messenger clients on your desktop all day but it's really a lot more interesting and useful to have a choice of several communites.
Twhirl, for example, allows you to have several of these open at any given time. I find it useful to have foud small Twhirl windows open on a virtual screen. While I'm writing this, I can switch to the Twhirl screen and see at a glance if thetre's anything of interest in the communities I follow. I just answered a question about video editing software there.
Connectivity.
I just read that even
Twitter is going to be using the open source standard for microblogging. Much more
here from a post on LouisGray.com by
Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive.
I'm currently testing three of these platforms: Yammer (commercial service), laconica and openmicroblogger. Yammer has nice features for their target market, businesses with groups of employees talking about projects.
Some further reading from
Venture Beat.
Twitter in its current form is merely a successful proof of concept. It has shown there is high demand for micro-blogging. But there are no effective noise filters, and directional tweeting is not sufficient.
Tweetdeck is a good attempt at filtering and grouping, but is still too clumsy from a UX point of view.
There needs to be capability to selectively add micro-blog chats to your own 'Conversation Pool' from multiple sources (Twitter, Laconi.ca, etc.). These chats, of course, would have to be tagged somehow - perhaps the next generation of hashtags.
Think Tweetdeck and FriendFeed, in one UI. I think that's where we're headed.
john
The whole Open standard thing should get us there eventually.
It would qualify IMHO as a microforum site.