Current status of social media and that of forums in it??

[ruth cowdrey]

Forums used to be a bastion of online social communities. Not the first kind of community. You had newsgroups and others before Forums, in the form we see them now, became big. But for several years now, there have been lots of big forums, huge, diverse communities or people discussing various things in various manners. They've been one of the main forms of community on the web, especially since chat rooms began to decline in popularity.

Now that we have this new raft of social community, from the Diggs/Reddits/Techmemes, to the Facebook/Myspaces/Bebos, are forums as we know them, under threat?

 So many people now have blogs, especially within the broad web development community, that a lot of people write their musings there, or initiate discussions there. Lots of people are using the Digg/Reddit like sites for finding new links and discussing them, and I think more and more people are starting to use places like Facebook for relatively basic, easily setup communities.

With all this going on, what role does a forum, like this one for instance, have in the evolving social setup?
Do forums need to adapt to the new ways people are connecting and differentiate themselves? Do they needs to pick up on some of the things that other 'web 2.0' social sites are doing? In 3/4 years, are forums likely to have as big a following as they do now? Or will it just be the ones that keep up with the changing ideas of social media and the niche boutiques that keep, or expand, their following?

If you were setting up a new forum now, would the Diggs and Facebook of the world affect how you did it?

[tonyklaus]

I love it when my friends read my mind and ask all my questions for me!!

I definitely think the tide is going out on forums, unless they come up with something innovative. When I realized our threads were being Sphunn and commented on THERE, rather than here, that raised an eyebrow. We like the nod, of course, but it got me wondering.

Do people expect/want to vote and/or Digg/Sphinn/Fetch now?

SEOMoz jumped ahead by making their blog into a mini-forum with social aspects like voting. They developed a community via their blog, which is a high achievement and not common.

I like the ability to express emotions with emoticons, which blogs don't offer.

[jeremy]

If you were setting up a new forum now, would the Diggs and Facebook of the world affect how you did it?

By nature, I believe, all social media, including forums, are complementary.

There are no either/or choices between; face-to-face talk, telephone call, email, instant message.

The nature of the message, the availability of others, and the hope, expectation or need that the message results in a conversation, will determine which medium to use when.

Taking a step outside the link-happy moments ("oh look! a rainbow!"), a forum by its very nature has a huge thing going for it: it is meant as a place to talk, discuss, converse.

I could start a conversation on any subject right now. I can't do so on Digg, Reddit or Sphinn. These require me to have something to point to (the URL) to talk about.

Only at a forum can you be the thread starter...

[spider12]

Forums serve people who want to interact with others on everyone's terms. Blogs are about interacting with others on your own terms. Social media is about finding stuff to avoid work

Blogs serve those who are motivated, forums those who like to be involved infrequently. A blog needs a person who regularly writes. Forums stay alive by weight of numbers. and no one is required to "carry" it.

Which is better, worse or otherwise is pure perspective. Whereas someone like me, for whom the word "sporadic" was invented, benefits more from a forum.

Others, with an eye for talent but perhaps either a lack of self confidence or simply no interest in creating, are better suited to social media, where they can point out cool stuff, and develop a reputation based upon a critical eye.

All will survive, but forums are likely to be,m unfortunately, the least profitable in purely monetary terms.

[gavin tann]

great thread guys... very useful.. never knew that much stuff.. quite illuminating...

[tonyklaus]

think it depends on the people, mostly. I'd say this is the only reason people stay on forums, blogs or elsewhere.

To get members to a forum, you need to put extremely valuable people here and make it clear that any member can get their response.
If we take SEOmoz, as an example, it gets plenty of comments and grows, because it was the intent to build a community and the crew worked on it, hard. They responded to questions, interacted with the community and such. Naturally, a community was built around a very responsive and sometimes entertaining core of the people.

On social sites, people get to randomly interact with other people, see their emotions, interests and share things that interest them. If we make it easy for forum members to share things they like, it'll be a social site, too, regardless of how it's called.

[Agor75]

you may be right in your perception of comments on Digg, although I saw it otherwise.

Perhaps you have to take into account the content of the comments as well.  So perhaps its the percentage of items which have greater than say 50 kB of discussion.  Would that be a better discriminator between the good Forums and the Diggs of this world?

[mark]

Ok tht's fine