What do we know about Microforums?

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Friday, November 14. 2008

What do we know about Microforums?

I'm not a blogger. And now to prove it, I'll post in this blog, again.

I'm not a social media expert or a web site designer. I don't have a zillion followers on Twitter (randulo) and no one cares what I say on Friendfeed or anywhere else. So what do I know?

I know that my company got its best account, one we still service, on a Compuserve forum in about 1996. I answered a single post on that forum, emailed and went to see the person and we've been working together for the last 12 years. I know how forums work having written my own (in C and in PHP) and having set up most common open source forums. I've maintained large instances of phpBB for the last 15 years. Fifteen years on the Internet is like saying, "founded in 1855" in other businesses.

I used to play music every night of the week in bars. Seeing how people act night after night is a better intro to psychology and human behavior than any university will ever offer. In the same light, managing busy forums for 15 years is a pretty wide range of online behavior. Communities vary, but the things an admin observes on forums are the exact same things you see on social networks today.

I have been reading people like Chris Brogan for the last year or so, and I look at a lot of what he recommends by sharing his Google Reader feed. I strongly believe that with a few tweaks, the Twitter clones could replace traditional forums which are for the most part fading in interest, other than specific areas like tech support. Even there, I see more short form sites and less actual full-blown forums.

So with that intro, let's see what we can find out about how
OpenMicroBlogger (has nice plugin arch.)
laconica (laconi.ca, identi.ca, have they decided yet?)
Yammer (hosted)
Yonkly (.NET, a deal killer for me)
Twingr and the rest can do for us.

Reminder of new features of interest:

Public timeline and "followed" timeline.
Site-wide mute of individuals by admin or "Survivor" function
Individual mute/follow for members
Ignore/Follow statistics (displayed or not, admin's discretion)
Optional "Survivor" function acts on karma calculated by follows/ignores to mute certain members. They would not be muted to those following them, only on public timeline.


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