socialmedian: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

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The chat roomforum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

Source: Scobleizer

Nov 02, 2009

Summary

I’ve been doing online communities for more than 20 years, starting in 1985 when a friend had a BBS. One thing I’ve noticed over and over again is that chat rooms and forums start out fun and then devolve over time for various reasons.

But in 2000 I discovered that blogs had the opposite effect. They got more interesting over time.

Why is that?

I call it the chat room/forum problem and I think I’ve discovered the cause.

See, in a chat room no one is in control. But usually some small group starts one. They are interesting at the start. I remember when a small group of us joined Microsoft’s NetMeeting forum back in 1996. Those were the days! They were fun. Extremely so. Some of us are even still friends today and we always love to talk about the early days of that group.

Why?

Because all of us had a common interest (a new product) and we were a small group and we were at the same level at the beginning (all of us were newbies).

But it devolved.

How?

First, wave after wave of newbies came in. They all wanted their attention and you couldn’t tell the experienced users (

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Comments (1)

Courane01,

Nov 02, 2009

An interesting perspective @scobleizer. I still love Google Reader and Friendfeed for various reasons. In the interest of personal productivity, picking one platform for your attention may be good. What value is it adding to your personal and professional goals? I find value for most of my time in Google Reader, Friendfeed, Facebook, then Twitter, with LinkedIn trailing back there somewhere. Each has a different purpose for me. Tech news, then informal networking and , followed by B2B style networking.