Tag: COMMUNITY

In the grand scheme of things, $10 million isn't a ton of money for a big company like Yahoo! to spend acquiring another company. Still, for an embattled Yahoo!, shutting down MyBlogLog is another sad trombone in its symphony of missteps. MyBlogLog was a service which allowed bloggers to create a community for their sites. The shutdown was called out in the famous "sunsetting" slideshow in late ...

Idea Informer is a widget that you put on your site, and it takes the form of one of those "feedback tabs" to the right of the page (you've seen them before, I'm sure). The thing that's a bit different about Idea Informer is that any comments left by visitors become public, and other visitors can vote them up. You can think of it as a public wish list. One problem with the implementation is that ...

Good afternoon! This week we're fortunate enough to have the Mozilla Director of Community, Asa Dotzler, here with us in the Download Squad bunker. His yappy little dog doesn't like it much down here -- but with soundproofed cells, who cares? After my last interview with his comrade Aza Raskin (what are the chances of having two people called Asa working in the same office?), I was keen to find ...

You may not be familiar with Immunet, the Canadian startup who burst onto the scene last year with a light weight, community-driven Windows antivirus app. Immunet's user base is rapidly approaching 300,000 -- pretty phenomenal growth considering this screenshot from August of last year when I was one member out of 64. Immunet v1 has been a success, and the company is already hard at work on ...

I grew up in Fidonet and the BBS culture. I remember whole nights spent online in my early teens, slugging my way through text MUDs (multi-user D&D games). I really liked it. But it's gone. Times have moved on, things have changed. We now have graphics. Apparently, one Zach Perry takes issue with that. He has recently launched AEIN, or Alternative Electronic Information Network. In a ...

So, music site TheSixtyOne underwent a massive redesign. Old news, right? I was thrilled, others less so. Those disgruntled souls left plenty of comments sharing their feelings, and one of them was kind enough to set me up with a few of TheSixtyOne's top users. These are people who have been with the site for a year or two, day in, day out, and accumulated gazillions of "points". Amongst ...

Threadless is more than a t-shirt company, as Grant Robertson found out when he chatted with Jeffrey Kalmikoff. Jeffrey explained how Threadless works, and how they've managed to build a community of nearly a million people who submit and vote on awesome new shirts. And that's just registered users, not including the thousands who just use Threadless to buy the hottest new designs. Stay tuned to ...

Speaking of Joel Spolsky, it turns out that he recently unveiled a new online community for software developers to ask and answer questions. Well, Joel didn't do it himself; he partnered with Jeff Atwood, another well-known developer. The concept behind Stack Overflow is that it is a focused arena where developers can help each other, with a digg-like voting scheme to try to bubble the good ...

Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager for the open-source Open Office project, says software piracy also hurts the open-source community, and though it can be argued that open-source is bad for innovation, most of us love the open source community. So does the occasional pirated piece of software really hurt our beloved open source projects? Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including ...

This morning, the good folks over at the openSUSE project announced the official launch of the merged forums. Prior to this, English speaking openSUSE users had a bit of a confusing ride when it came to joining a support community specifically for their distro -- they had the support forums at the Novell openSUSE site, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de to choose from. The merged forums, ...

Twing is a new search engine that indexes almost 5,000 online forums, on subjects ranging from the very general (arts and entertainment) to the extremely specific (Scottish Snooker). On top of its search features, it also has a 1990's-Yahoo!-style directory organized by topic, and a collection of trends and toplists called the Community Buzz Directory. Does Twing actually have a finger on the ...

If you live in New York, Chicago, or San Fancisco, you have to check out EveryBlock. No really, you have no choice. It's too cool to pass up. While there are plenty of services out there that aim to give you all the latest news, restaurant reviews, and other information about your community, EveryBlock does an awesome job of pulling together information from disparate sources to give you an ...

If you're the sort of person who defines yourself by the stuff you buy, has eBay got a new social network for you. The auction site has launched eBay Neighborhoods, which are basically little communities organized around specific items or classes of items. For example, the most popular neighborhood right now is Coffee Lovers, but there are about 600 neighborhoods covering everything from Stephen ...

Getting ready for interviews can sometimes be tricky. You just never know what to really expect, but want to stay on your toes and be prepared for anything. That's where InterviewUp steps into place. The InterviewUp online community allows people to share, ask, find and search interview questions and answers. If InterviewUp manages to attract a strong user community, this could be a great tool for ...

Six Apart's community-focused Vox blogging service has been making a number of incremental improvements over the last month or two with minor updates to their software. New themes and other enhancements are all welcome additions, but two specific new features turned out heads enough for a mention. First: the new Vox This bookmarklet. While Vox has been arguably way ahead of the competition by ...