Washington-based Bordee is preparing to launch a new free service, built with Ruby on Rails, that lets anyone create a topic-specific message board for any domain name. Bordee isn’t a new idea - there are lots of message board services out there. Google, Yahoo, Ezboard, Groupee and others have competing products. But I like the way Bordee is tweaking the message idea to create discussion groups for any website. it’s a good Saturday afternoon post.
The best way to access Bordee will be via a plugin for Firefox or IE (the site is pre-launch and the Firefox plugin link is currently dead, so I haven’t tested this). If you are on a website with a Bordee discussion board a button on the plugin will light up. You can also use the plugin to create a message board for that website. The hierarchy is fairly straightforward - there can be only one top level message board for any domain, and one sub-board for each page on the domain. Any number of topic specific boards can be created under these.
The main reason I think this is interesting is that it creates a sort of “shadow” web with user generated content outside of the control of the website itself but associated with it. The browser plugin ties it all together. Lots of sites are experimenting in this area, including Shadows (our posts on Shadows are here) and others.
Others that are doing this for ‘live chat’ of every domain name are: Gabbly (awesome) and ChatCreator (not really specific to domains, just instant chat rooms). If I were MyBlogLog, the next natural extension to their service would be implementing live chat into their community like these. Or possibly actual message boards, such as this Bordee.
Sounds a lot like Third Voice.
Since when was Groupee free?
Thanks, Dave, I was trying to remember the name of Third Voice, it was so long ago. Those who don’t know history…
The ffx plugin link is broken and the IE plugin is not yet available. Is anyone from bordee awake?
its a slightly better organized version of thirdvoice.
Off-topic question.
The Feedburner counter on the top of the page just jumped from 113k to 598k readers… is that the normal number of readers of TechCrunch?
Amazing.
Not sure if this is the right place to post this (and feel free to slap me if it is), but we just launched the public beta of Tooum Switchboard. Switchboard is a new free hosted service that combines your blog and your forum into one easy to use app. The idea of creating a discusion for any page on the net - similar to how bordee works - will actually be part of Switchboard within the next few weeks. If anyone wants to know more, please let us know.
(again, if this post is out of line, pease let me know or just delete it. Mike, if you read this, how can I get in touch to show you what we are doing at Tooum?)
Ruby on Rails is a horrible framework to use for a message board system given its well-known performance and scalability shortcomings. There are ways to mitigate against these problems but I don’t see any reason to even try to use RoR for message boards, which can be extremely resource-intensive, when much better platforms exist. PHP and MySQL can work well, but even the popular vBulletin message board system which uses these has scalability issues with very large communities. PHP and Postgres is a much better open-source solution.
Good luck to these guys if they ever get any popular message boards going. Hardware and development costs will eat them alive. But I doubt they’ll get many, as most serious message boards move up to self-hosted solutions like vBulletin.
In response to Techie on scalability.
You don’t need performance to obtain scalability. I don’t see why you can’t scale a RoR solution. If RoR provides the ability to remote to another machine you can theoretically scale it. Scalability is not achieved by simply selecting a scalabile programming language or database. Scalability is achieved by architecting your software to operate across multiple physically separated computers.
A little of topic, but I couldn’t help but respond to such misinformation.
Sounds a bit like BBCi Connector - http://www.colfelt.com/applica.....view.shtml - which was a kind of iM-around-chat, and was itself based on another program, whose name I forget.
Sounds a bit like BBCi Connector - http://www.colf…roverview.shtml - which was a kind of iM-around-webpages, and was itself based on another program, whose name I forget.
In reply to Startups.in/India’s comment:
Awake now… I just woke up around 11pm PST. The link is fixed to the Firefox Plug-in, I apologize for keeping you waiting.
They will have a hard time… I have tried almost the same with Webride.org, a few months ago. Compare Bordee’s tagline:
“Bordee is a 100% FREE web service that enables you to instantly create a new message board for every web page on the internet.”
With Webride’s:
“Webride attaches discussion forums to each and every web page - on the fly. ”
To create a Webride-board, you don’t even need a browser extension, so it’s even much more usable. This is how a Techcrunch web page looks like, when discussed with Webride:
http://webride.org/discuss/spl.....ruptive%2F
The problem with Webride was: people started to use it as a means to promote their own website (since every discussed URL appeared on the Webride start page), not because the really wanted a board software. Basically, they *spammed* the Webride-Homepage
http://webride.org/
As a consequence, we have renamed Webride to *Newsride*, changed the whole concept, narrowed down the targeted audience and relaunched it yesterday:
“Newsride is a social community aimed at news junkies and politically interested surfers.”
http://newsride.org
This is what a discussion on Newsride now looks like:
http://newsride.org/discuss/?uriId=7
Basically, it does the same as before: attach a discussion board to each and every web page / url. But we now only allow *news* web pages to be discussed.
In addition, we have added many very advanced community features (mailbox-system, voting, foaf-connection paths, groups, etc.).
@Dave, Michael - “ThirdVoice”
I suppose the times have changed. digg, furl, reddit and netscape users are leaving comments “on” web sites too, without asking for any permission. It’s not that easy to define, what “leaving comments” means, anyway, since the comments are never stored on the commented web page and are never visible to people that don’t use the third commenting party software. So I can see very little difference in what ThirdVoice has done some years ago.
I have tried the Firefox plugin. It works, but it has a bug. If the Bordee forum is active, and I type another URL into the address bar, the Bordee forum doesn’t disappear - it still takes up all my Firefox client area, and I have to close it first.
This is quite annoying.
Also, I don’t like their board. I would have prefered something like Invision Power Board or PHPBB.
I think that scalability issues with such a system are easy to solve. If Bordee offers boards for 10,000 web sites, it’s very easy to them to host these boards on separate servers (10 boards per server, or so), or even to move boards to other Bordee servers.
The user doesn’t even see or know the URL of the Bordee board, because it’s not shown to them. The user only knows the URL of the site he or she wants to comment on.
Interesting ideas. It’s should not be too hard to make it scalable for 10,000 sites.
I’m _freaking out_ about Third Voice. All I remember is the headline. Talk about an idea before it’s time. Holy moley. That just blows me away, given the crazy things happening now in the ’shadow web’, as M.A. referred to it.
The protest about Third Voice - I presume that would apply to all shadow sites/tools/technologies in use today, then? I certainly can’t see a case for protest. Anyone care to enlighten me?
That’s a good name - ’shadow web’. I like it a lot. Reminds me of ‘the secret government’ Moyers flick ( http://www.informationclearing.....le3281.htm ). The movie used the word ’secret’, but ’shadow’ could have worked just as well. In Moyers’ flick, the ’shadow government’ was a bad thing - it was, by its nature, anti-democratic. On the flip side, I like the idea of the ’shadow web’. It seems like it could be very democratic, and it is being created to counter anti-democratic forces in our society - the exact opposite of why our ’secret government’ was created. That’s a good thing, and it’s part of why I’m chasing it. In a way, the ’shadow web’ is kinda like Wikipedia - both sides of the story get presented - but the shadow web more actively reaches out to people.
This ‘actively reaching out’ part seems like a very good thing to me. We have four or five big media companies determining most of (80+%) what most of us see, read, and hear, so the existence of the internet doesn’t mean we’ll have perfect information or even better information than in the past - not automatically. Who controls distribution? We’ve already seen corporations and politicians moving to regulate the internets. Imagine Bush starts pushing his next war meme - Iran is harboring Martians or something. What if, embedded in that very AP propaganda release, distributed to thousands of media outlets/newspapers around the world, there is a side-by-side refutation of the false claims made by our or any other government? That’s powerful stuff.
I’ve been working on some things in this space, myself, and I’m astounded to see all the different ways people are going at this. Good stuff. I hope one of them eventually catches on. This is a very big deal.
p.s. I just downloaded and tried IE7. I almost never use IE - so I know IE is already much faster than Firefox, but holy cow - IE7. Unreal fast. It’s even able to open the new Yahoo Mail beta in under an hour.
Advice needed: what type of forum plugin might be most easily integrated with blogging software such as WordPress?
Hi I am new to this page, having only recently found it. But I just want to quickly add, at the risk of being off topic, that it is very well done. I will certainly return, and certainly make a relevant comment next time.
Wow - it seems like Eng-Sion Tan, one of the founders of Third Voice, was all on the democracy tip ( http://www.wired.com/news/busi.....03,00.html ). Dude is my hero.
Anyone know what Eng-Sion Tan is up to these days?
TechCrunch mentioned Third Voice last year:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005.....h-stickis/
What’s funny is the admission by all involved, including Tan, that Third Voice was ‘graffiti’. And maybe it was - but it’s a bit absurd, too. “One man’s graffiti” and all that. Goes right to the heart of free speech.
Regardless, it’s pretty unbelievable that their company was able to get such a strong reaction from the establishment. That’s how dangerous this idea is.
p.s. Yes, TechCrunch could use a discussion board. Maybe TechCrunch can beat the graffiti artists to the punch!
“Ruby on Rails is a horrible framework to use for a message board system given its well-known performance and scalability shortcomings.”
Which well-known performance and scalability issues? The ones Perl, PHP, Python, .NET, Java, and Ruby all have?
*Everything* has a scaling and performance issue at some point. If your site/service gets so wonderfully popular that you are pulling multi-million page views then you’re going to have to make changes *no matter what you are using*.
Very few sites have the type of traffic that matters anyway so don’t worry about it on day one. Worry about it when you need to. It’s not a big deal then either.
You scale Rails just like you scale anything else — you optimize the software as best you can when you detect specific bottlenecks. And if you need more juice you toss another server at it. No Big Deal at all.
The price of CPU cycles continues to drop. The price of programmers continues to rise or stay steady. Use a language/framework that allows small teams to be hugely productive. We recommend Rails, but use whatever you like best.
Think about the cost of having to hire an additional programmer. Then think about the cost of having to bring a few more servers online. You can probably bring on around 10 high powered servers online for the cost of one good programmer’s salary. So if you can save a programmer or two because your framework allows one or two people to do the work of 3 or 4, you’re “scaling” way better than having to worry about adding a few servers down the road.
Nice use of vanilla - lussumo.com
Thanks Brian. Trying it out now.
Kind of funny reading Jason’s comments related to ROR. It almost sounds as if someone from MSFT wrote it defending one of their old COM/DNA based technologies back in 1999.
Also, there’s a thing called offshoring where php, Java and C# programmers go for something like $5-10/hour.
So, the cost of programmers has fallen a lot more dramatically than the cost of hardware, IMHO.
I’ve no experience with ROR so can’t say anything about ROR scalability, just commenting on Jason’s post.
Don’t fuck with the Rails crowd if you want to keep your head connected to your neck. I’ve seen people destroyed in the comments on this blog before by talking about rails limitations.
If anyone wants to see a nice RoR boards implimentation check out CNET’s chowhound boards. Not only are they lightning quick, but designed quite well.
looks like there is a “rails mafia” patroling on the discussion boards…
http://discuss.joelonsoftware......l.3.159134
Don’t ask the ‘wrong rail’ questions!
Anything developed by good developers can be scaled, but all frameworks do not scale equally or as easily. Let the Rails crowd argue all they like. Rails has its advantages in some areas but I would argue that at the very least it is unproven in extremely large implementations of resource-intensive applications like message boards.
I provide development services specifically for message board applications. Most of the message boards I work on have anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 users online and interacting heavily with the application at any given time. The vast majority use PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL. I have yet to see *any* message boards with this type of activity that are built with Rails. If Chowhound, which is fairly small and not very active, is the best example of a Rails message board implementation then I wouldn’t want to be trying to build a message board service based on it. Why be the unlucky company that gets to see if it can work?
If you go to big-boards.com, a directory of some of the largest message boards in the world, you will notice that the majority are using PHP (and MySQL or PostgreSQL). Don’t see any Rails boards. Rails might be a very good choice for some applications, and even I would use it for some things, but why not go with a more proven choice for this type of application?
And Jason’s comment that “You can probably bring on around 10 high powered servers online for the cost of one good programmer’s salary” is too funny. For one, I haven’t seen any hard numbers showing that the number of programmers required to develop a well-built application in Rails is significantly different than with any other framework. Anybody have some real case studies on this? Would be great to have a contest to see two teams (one using Rails and one using another framework) trying to build a complex application by a given deadline and see a) which team can minimize staffing and b) which team comes up with the application that performs and scales more effectively. It’s very easy to go out and find qualified PHP programmers, and while you may not be able to get a top-notch programmer for $10/hour, there are some tasks that don’t require somebody with a Ph.D. in computer science. The number of highly skilled programmers for PHP, Java, ASP.net, etc. far exceeds the number of highly skilled Rails programmers (Rails is still fairly new and not used as much) which is something that any company should take into consideration. Lastly, it’s really dumb to think it’s simply OK to keep adding servers ad infinitum. That’s *not* the scalability solution a professional would recommend. I’d fire you for this type of comment if you worked for me. Hardware may be cheap, but if I have a solution that will enable me to scale to my needs with 50 servers versus a solution that would require 100 servers, I’m going with the 50 server solution, even if I had to hire an extra programmer to achieve it. It’s not just the cost of hardware. There’s costs related to rackspace, administration, hardware failure, etc. Bottom line: until there’s an indpendent study of the alleged ROI savings of using Rails and somebody has successfully implemented it in a hugely active message board application, I think Bordee is taking a risk.
Rails cult flame away…
Always have to give the people who worked on the project a nod for putting in the time and effort. Then comes the criticism…
Bordee’s overall structure and UI is going to become a dirty mess very fast, well I that’s only if people begin using this besides typing in “Test” and “Testing”. Just a piece of advice - put up a testing site for people who want to test the functionality. Now all they have is a bunch of garbage on their site. Fugly and looks like very unprofessional. A simple testing site solves this.
I’m going out on an assumption here and say that whoever wrote this used the idea to begin learning rails application development, and that’s fine and dandy and again I applaud anyone’s attempt but there are some things that still need to be considered, like friendly urls just for starters.
Instead of…
http://www.bordee.com/board/show_posts/110
why not…
http://www.bordee.com/site/review/invoicebase
Or something cleaner at least.
Next, there’s no simple way to add a site without using their Bordee browser button. (unless I’m missing something)
If so, that’s just ridiculous.
And in the end - it has absolutely no business model.
I think if the bordee team opened up the codebase a an open source project they and the rest of the RoR community may benefit greater in the long run.
This should have been featured on a Ruby site, not on tech crunch.
Has anyone figured out Bordeee’s business model yet ?
Rubyists already know the real shadow Web is Hoodwink’d.
http://hoodwinkd.hobix.com/
This is an interesting concept - to allow the conversation to continue on sites that don’t have the functionality for it, and completely outside the administration of the actual site. Message boards are typically moderated by someone. How does moderation of Bordee boards work?
Hi Mike, on the post ezboard seems to point to Yahoo Message Boards as well.
YES… its better organized version of thirdvoice.
i also think so.
i love google!
i love google!
i love google!
i love google!
i love google!
Hi guys !! This is something more than “awesome” !!!
–> http://music.genterist.net
After a long while ejoy this forum as a guest, now i decided to contribute something.
err… since i like music then this is the only thing “cool” i can contribute. [url=]Genterist Radio[/url] has more than 180 000 high quality mp3 songs
and IT’S LEGAL TO HEAR !!!
gezz… I am thrilled !!!
Hello, guys!
What a nice forum.
I came across zune-boards.com. Great resource! I’d recommend to anyone who has purchased
or acquired a zune.
Could anyone refer me to a good zune forum or something? I’m really desperate. (thats why im posting
here lol)
Hi all!
Bye
hi, how are you guys? i’m looking for more [url=http://www.2kresources.info/fullsitemap.php]spanish learning[/url] websites..anyone know of any?
thanks so much in advance!
i noticed that you guys aren’t part of http://vanguardsites.com
it would really help if you guys joined!
Hi
Bye
Hi,
Anyone know of this?
[url=http://fxtrading88.blogspot.com]FX Trading[/url]
Thanks,
Steve
Hello
Dispatch your announcements on thousand forums. Fast.
Detour of any kinds of protection.
contact me - promo.advert@yahoo.com.br
Bye
Hi
Fast question..i’m looking for information on [url=http://www.2information.info/fullsitemap.php]online surveys[/url]. i’m interested in working at home. anyone with any info, i would appreciate it.
Night
Falling prices have brought color laser printing within the reach of most business users, resulting in a steadily increasing demand for color toner cartridges.
“For some time now we’ve held off supplying remanufactured cartridges for the color laser toner cartridge market, until we could be sure all the quality issues have been dealt with” says Chris Russ, who has been in the laser and inkjet cartridge remanufacturing industry since 1990
Compatible ink cartridges, provided they’re of a high quality, are a significant savings. Like all Ezyink aftermarket products, they come with a satisfaction guarantee.
Sick of [b]working hard[/b] for poor pay?
Get the [url=http://www.the-day-job-killer.blogspot.com/]Day Job Killer[/url] and start to change your life
Hi all!
I’m new here!
What do you think about Madonna?
Thanks, bye
Hi all!
[url=http://allsearch.org]AllSearch.org[/url] - Find anything from across the Web.
It’s cool service.
G’night