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October 26, 2007

Meetro Working to Make Forum Creation Dead Simple

Mark Hendrickson

38 comments »

We’ve been informed that Meetro - provider of a location-based instant messaging service - is working on a stealth project that aims to make forum setup, customization, and moderation as easy as blogging with Blogger.

The project, codenamed “Makaha”, has been in development since the beginning of this year. While many forums require users to find their own hosting and install software, Makaha will enable users to create and personalize forums through a point-and-click interface. Forums will have their own subdomains at the Makaha website just as blogs have their own subdomains at Blogger.

Forum moderators will have full control over CSS styling (in addition to premade templates) and will benefit from an extensive community moderation system. Popular discussion threads will rise to the top of forum homepages in a Digg-like fashion, and users have access to a search function that crawls both individual forums and Makaha’s collection of forums as a whole. Makaha’s forums will also be designed with search engine optimization in mind so that traditional search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) index discussion threads effectively.

Makaha will launch about a couple of months from now. With the rise of social networking in the past few years, the popularity of good ol’ forums tends to get ignored, as do the billions of page views per month they generate. Even with the attractiveness of that traffic, few companies have been innovating in this space. We recently reviewed Tangler, which provides forums that function much like chat rooms by immediately displaying posts via Ajax when they are added to a discussion thread.

CrunchBase Information
Meetro
Tangler
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Automatt

    October 26th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

    Did someone say disruptive?

  2. cweeb

    October 26th, 2007 at 7:29 pm

    it takes 10 months to create a forum service ?

  3. Stephen Lev

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:05 pm

    Automatt: Forums were disruptive in 1995.

    I thought Meetro died… they just disappeared. I guess I was wrong.

  4. Bobo

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:05 pm

    how about they finish meetro first before starting something else, everytime i try to register with meetro they tell me they will let me know when its open to the public.

  5. Bobo

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:07 pm

    here is exactly what i get “Thank you! We will keep you posted.”

  6. Yelp Sucks

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

    sounds like yahoo groups…

  7. David

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

    from the post: “the popularity of good ol’ forums tends to get ignored, as do the billions of page views per month they generate”

    ‘billions of page views per month’… my ass, forums are dead, where do they get this stuff? have you seen a forum recently?

  8. Overuse Bubble

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:18 pm

    Has anyone else noticed a bubble in the use of the term “dead simple” here at Techcrunch. I’m starting to gag everytime I see it.

  9. Stephen Lev

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:29 pm

    >Has anyone else noticed a bubble in the use of the term “dead simple” here at Techcrunch. I’m starting to gag everytime I see it.

    A period at a proper place makes all the difference. For example, here’s the proper punctuation & capitalization:

    Meetro. Dead. Simple.

  10. Internet Man

    October 26th, 2007 at 8:57 pm

    “Popular discussion threads will rise to the top of forum homepages in a Digg-like fashion.” So in other words, threads with the most replies are listed first just like it has always been done. “The popularity of good ol’ forums tends to get ignored, as do the billions of page views per month they generate.” That’s because those page views are next to worthless. None of the features listed are new nor is the concept of hosted message boards. Ezboard, yahoo groups, etc.

  11. Atomic1fire

    October 26th, 2007 at 9:03 pm

    Forums are not dead
    they are good for public support
    (groups of users stating the same bug or wanting the same feature)
    and they are also good for small communities or when combined with popular sites
    such as kongregate.com having its own forum
    its harder for a standalone forum to be succesfull
    which is why forums are a part of a seperate website
    such as miniclip forums or yet again kongregate
    or some tech help sites can be successfull
    and meebo forums is also somewhat doing well
    the point is that while forums are somewhat worthless considering they are older
    they still have their places
    (mostly with a website as a community for that website or for support for whatever that website has)

  12. micfo.com

    October 26th, 2007 at 9:17 pm

    Forums are good if you have build up strong community and are active, a dead forums on a site can drive away customers.

  13. Timmy McHorowitz

    October 26th, 2007 at 9:44 pm

    Getting forums more simpler to install and moderate is not what is the problem with forums, surely. Even my 2 year old (dog) can install a forum and get it running.

    Getting people discussing and moderating themselves is more to the point.

  14. Meetro forum creation project

    October 26th, 2007 at 10:17 pm

    I am excited to hear this because forums are among the most effective way of generating fast traffics, so Meetro project will make a huge impact on internet marketing.

  15. RW

    October 26th, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    Anyone use Tangler? A pretty cool and easy to setup forum tool that was @ TC40. Forums have a place in the market, but they cannot be contrived or unmanaged. Just putting up a forum does nothing for any business. But if used properly as a tool, and if you have something worth discussing, they can be very valuable to companies……

  16. Steve Spalding

    October 26th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

    Forums don’t generate fast traffic.

    Forums generate a stronger community.

    Forums are a lot of work, work that most everyone to creates them grossly underestimates.

    Forums are only really useful in settings where you have a product/service/etc… to discuss, or you have a particular conversation worthy topic.

    Dead Forums are the saddest thing in the world.

    Meetro sounds very similar to Tangler made less interesting. Does that mean it’s bad? No, it just means there isn’t much new to see here. The reason that Forums (SomethingAwful, Sitepoint etc…) still exist is because they are the rare occasions that all the rules of proper Forum development were followed.

    My thoughts? I certainly hope they are offering a little more than a Forum white label.

  17. thebusinessofsoftware.net

    October 26th, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    It is not quite the same thing as somebody buying a discussion board and running it themselves. Why? The reason is that Meetro will own the domain and the data, which means conceptually it is akin to google and yahoo groups.

  18. Orog

    October 26th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

    I don’t hate the idea. Something about making things much easier than they were before seems smart. I’m just curious to see if we will see any innovation out of this since forums seem like they haven’t evolved in years. Especially in terms of filtering content and finding what you want (search).

  19. Bloobeard

    October 27th, 2007 at 12:31 am

    Not every forum is dead: Whirlpool (custom-built Australian broadband and generally geekiness forum) goes from strength to strength. It has fanatical supporters (and importantly, detractors) and a strong community as well as a bunch of volunteer moderators. It wields considerable power in the industry in Australia, And it is generally more interesting than an app like Facebook, which loses its attraction for many after the initial rush of friend finding.

  20. BoardTracker

    October 27th, 2007 at 2:36 am

    Forums are far from dead and are in fact thriving. There are countless forums out there covering every imaginable niche, many of which are HUGE with millions of posts and very active and growing communities.

    There is also a plenty of innovation in the boardscape if you take a look around - certainly in the forum search field at least.. ;)

  21. atribut957

    October 27th, 2007 at 4:51 am

    1000 2 5000 8 10000 13 50000 50
    20000
    : 10% !!!
    33-87-01 anhelluss()yandex.ru

  22. sputnick

    October 27th, 2007 at 7:55 am

    One thing that puzzles me is that with all the breakneck development going on, disccusion board technology is still stuck in the 1990’s. Almost all forums, including, sad to say, TechCrunch Forums, rely on extremely crap technology. Dozens of crucial features are lacking, and just about all of the forums use near-identical interfaces.

    For example, TechCrunch Forums doesn’t even float threads by activity, which makes them totally useless. So even though TechCrunch gets all this traffic, the forums are basically dead because the technology is crap.

    I don’t blame TechCrunch, though, I blame the lack of good forum scripts. The reason we haven’t implemented forums at our site is because everything available is so shitty that I’d have to code my own forum engine, which would eat up all of my time for about six weeks.

    I hope Meetro and Tangler can take discussion forums to the next level. Forums still constitute the meat and potatoes of the Internet. Social networking is junk food in comparison.

  23. dweezel

    October 27th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Don’t even bother, a strategic alliance between vBulletin and Facebook will have this landscape covered.

    @sputnick (22) vBulletin is “dead simple” and has a great support community. One of my webforums just installed a widget for YouTube video embeds. I wrote a position on vBulletin for TechCrunch a few weeks ago.

    http://dweezel.info/

  24. Andrew Holt

    October 27th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    I’m not entirely sure who their target audience is - support forums or discussion forums on topics? Discussion boards are still extremely popular, but the popular ones are all standalone communities with their own design and functionality. None of the cookie-cutter forums becomes popular, because people don’t feel that the community is unique. As with any product, they need to have a unique value proposition to attract a loyal base. A hosted forum on a subdomain isn’t all that much different than a community on Tribe, for example, almost all of which were dead since competition tended to spread the audience thin, rather than weed out a single winner.

    I’m a member of several car forums, all of which are extremely popular. They all focus, for the most part, on a specific make of automobile. I’ve had friends start several forums (which isn’t really very hard), and only the ones that truly took the time to create a completely custom design+template had any success, since for the most part almost every hobby or topic already has a community, and there needs to be something to attract people to a new one.

    I really like the Meetro guys, and look forward to the product. However, if this is focusing on support forums, where people don’t need a custom design, most people will already have a place to host it, and would prefer to just use Beast (Rails) or vBulletin. If it’s focusing on solving problems for general discussion boards, I don’t think it will have much of an audience. The problem to solve there isn’t the creation of the board, since that’s going to have to require a lot of effort, but building a community, which inherently requires the forum to offer something unique.

  25. lawrence

    October 27th, 2007 at 12:34 pm

    Forum software really hasn’t moved forward much in the last few years, which is surprising given how far other social media tools have come. I think there is a big opportunity here to grab some marketshare quick in a “niche” that has massive traffic. This is a Ning-like play.

  26. dweezel

    October 27th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    @24 Andrew Holt
    Great explanation, I have been a webforums auto enthusiast for 10 years. I saw that vBulletin offers a blogging mod, do you think that’s a good feature for a community to install?

  27. Joe T.

    October 27th, 2007 at 4:56 pm

    Will meetro have a “Makaha moment” with its new app? maybe they should contact George Allen to be their new evangelist…

  28. Steve Ballmer

    October 27th, 2007 at 5:38 pm

    Forum creation is dead simple!
    Just use MSForum Creator.net!

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  29. Dave

    October 28th, 2007 at 1:46 am

    I’v tried the vBulletin blogging mod but it is nowhere like WP and others.

  30. Kevin Fox

    October 30th, 2007 at 10:35 am

    I would also think a mention of Pibb (http://pibb.com) would be appropriate. It has a few features other apps like Tangler and meetro dont like; full OpenID support, IRC relay, RSS feeds for channels, etc….

  31. Javiderus

    October 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    Hi, this is cool! +1
    Great!

  32. Peter

    November 10th, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    i would like to see someone offer the ability to create/register a full domain on the fly. i can do it with godaddy right now - i’m sure they’d be willing to partner.

    i can register a new domain with godaddy, click a couple of buttons to install whatever cms i want, and a few hours later myownpersonaldomain.com is rockin with a full-featured cms or whatever other pre-installed app i wanted.

    why can’t these web2.0 firms off that feature instead of the crappysubdomain.someweb20firm.com?

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