Category: Social Media

Of Course You’re Being Sold – What did you think would happen?

When Flickr sold to Yahoo, some users were concerned about the fate of their community. More recently, Google bought YouTube and now users are complaining: “Since it was the `people’ that made YouTube, why aren’t they being paid billions?“ What did you think was going on? That some how people with lots of investment money… Read more »

Forum Interface Evolved: PHPBB + Yahoo! UI

I’m all excited this morning. I ran into Jack Slocum‘s PHPBB+YUI project. You can see the default PHPBB install here and then check out the YUI version here. The readability improvements are absolutly astounding. I’ve seen attempts to create multi-pane forum views fail many times. This version seems to take a lot of cues from… Read more »

CC: The Accidental Virtual Community

I can’t begin to guess how many times I’ve complained when someone with my e-mail address would forward something silly to me and a few hundred friends – with all of our names exposed in the CC – only to have half a dozen people hit “reply-all” instead of responding directly to her. (Admittedly, occasionally… Read more »

Circular Definitions: Blog & Forum

Blog : A public forum where only one user can create a thread. Forum : A community blog, or collection of blogs organized by subject, where any community member can create a thread.

My First Community: Fantasy Origin

I’ve always loved video games. My first non-pen-and-paper RPG was Dragon Warrior for the NES. I got it free with my subscription to Nintendo Power – so it was long after the game was originally published. My next RPG was a step up – Final Fantasy II (us) for the SNES. I loved the genre… Read more »

How a blog is worth over $9,000 a month.

Disclaimer I’m using the term ‘blog’ as it’s accurate to the subject; however, any source of original syndicated content would apply. To assume that what I present here is limited to the scope of blogging is rather close minded. The Setup As folks who know me are aware, I work at a video game development… Read more »

Citadel, MySpace, and BBS

So, I’m wanting to find out more about this projected called Citadel. It’s a groupware package for lots of important stuff like calendars, email, and chat. I actually found it while looking for a good calendar server solution. Citadel is more than a calendar for sure, the site says it can be used like a… Read more »

How to NOT build community.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had an e-mail dialog with the organizer of a meetup.com group for marketing. It all began shortly after I added the group to my list. I noticed several very pointed e-mails asking people to RSVP for the upcoming gathering. So, I submitted my RSVP. On the day of… Read more »

Frappr – It’s like Web 2.0 meets MySpace

I just found Frappr.com tonight. What a surprise! As this post’s title suggests, the best way to sum the site up is as “a Web 2.0 version of MySpace“. It really is kinda nifty. From what I’ve found about the site tonight, it looks like it began as a way of mapping your social network… Read more »

Building better communities by knowing your user.

I was reading Web Development 2.0 and found a lot of really interesting information. One bit relates well to virtual communities. One example: Flickr had a report of users with no contacts in the Flickr social network, which they called the “Loneliest Users” report. What a great report — a way to see who is… Read more »