Live at OCS - Demo Time
Good morning to all three of you interested in refreshing my blog regularly today! The day has started with some demos.
8:30: Forum One - Speak Out - Is a unique chatting service they offer to their clients. You can schedule a chat and questions can come in and be approved in advance. Then the transcripts are automatically generated with Q/A style results published right away to the Internet. I like the feature that allows you to solicited questions ahead of time for people that may not be able to make the live chat.
8:45: WetPaint - WYSIWYG wiki technology that can be integrated web sites. The demo site is www.wikifido.com. Cool demo site with dogs, but it doesn't work with IE7 yet. It thinks that IE7 is less than IE 6. "we recommend Internet Explorer 6.0 or FireFox 1.0.7 and higher for PCs". Update - I'm told IE7 support is days away. You can create free demos on wetpaint.com. Then they also give style options. Thier intro expereince when you create a new site is cool because they automatically play a flash demo on "the first edit".
The service is free and add funded. They recently took on a pay contract with ABC to do a lost wiki. (https://lostwiki.abc.com )
8:58: www.ittoolbox.com - Is an online community site for IT Pros. They bill themselves as a media company that's been profitable on their own for years. The content you see is very targeted based on your interaction and the profile information that you fill out. For example: you automatically get a stream of posts from people who's posts you contributed in before. That's a neat idea.
Good talk on looking at your site for social networking feature opportunities that make sense for your business. They are also looking at a credibility point system for thier users that will automatically give them more power on the site.
9:05: https://www.yuku.com/ - "Message Boards 2.0". Looks like a modern version of ezboard that allows anyone to easily create an online community and set of message boards. Users can get e-mail, RSS, and SMS messaging. They also reskinned mediawiki to view their specs. They publish their specs online via wikis. They don't give users access to the specs. Specs are mostly powerpoint pictures. They do, however, have a good voting page where users can see features recently completed, in development, and suggested features that they can vote on.
9:10: https://www.changeeverything.ca/ - "Welcome to ChangeEverything.ca, the site for people in Vancouver, Victoria and the Lower Mainland who want to change themselves, their communities or their world." The site is built on the 43things toolset. You know they are Web 2.0 because "ChangeEverything.ca is in permanent beta". They started a "how to" section that has targeted posts like these on saving money: https://www.changeeverything.ca/learn_how_to_save_money
It's 43things, but done for a local community to keep the community more geographically specific.
9:15: Good question about when to do your own new site or leverage stuff like myspace. The answer was around the discreteness of your community. In thier case they felt the need for a local community like this rather than simply being part of a larger community.
9:26: https://www.liveworld.com/ - Community software provider. Their trying to do solutions that integrate the right community flavor for the site they work with. The example they are showing off is https://community.tvguide.com/index.jspa.
9:30: What's next for liveworld? - Doing a lot of video and also doing more to allow people to participate with mobile components. They also specialize in moderation tools that let people moderate 600 posts/hour. They sell these tools along with their software for sites to give to their moderators. No Joe, you can't up and quit. :-)
9:35: Breaking news that google may pay over 1billion for youtube. This is going to be a big topic of conversation today. There was already a lot of conversation about youtube business models.
9:36: https://www.lithium.com/ - Another community software/services provider. Very proud of their plays into gaming since they run the US playstation forums and nintendo forums.
They also brag about their CRM/community integration for community support. This way your company can link customers that call to posts they've made in their communities. They also have forum software that lets users escalate questions to the companies official support staff for a fee.
9:38: https://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation is their (Lithium) playstation site with the latest version of their software.
9:40: ROI study back from one customer that claimed they saved 40million in support costs. But the impact on sales the community had was even bigger than the cost savings.
End of demo time - new post time.