Its a great product rick but the upgrades just are not exciting anymore. I think of it from the user not the Admin side of it.
I have to agree with that statement.
There are so many products coming out now that are clones of the MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, and other very popular user community destinations, that mimic the look and feel of those apps and are written in PHP. Most of them now include the feature of allowing a user to manage a web page of some sort, and have limited control over it, and blog with it, and upload multimedia, control a contact or 'buddy' list, etc. Many of these products includes availability of the Single Sign-Ons (e.g. OpenID) that permits users registered on a large service provider such as Yahoo to have instant registered access to your site. The ability to change not only the colors and background images of a style, but the entire layout as well, with just one click. The ability to have "plug-ins" of all sorts, such as a product like Moodle, for instance.
All of
THAT would be "exciting".
Users want more now that they are accustomed to the features on MySpace and FaceBook. They've been trained to think that it's normal to have such features available on a website, and when they come across sites that don't offer them, those sites look primitive. Old-fashioned. Out of touch.
I know the UI is important. But monetizing our sites, and drawing traffic to them is pretty important too. Why should you add Blogs now? Because you've been promising to do it for a very long time, and there's no compelling reason
not to keep your promise.
The broad availability of many, many white-label user community products with forums, chats, blogs, photo and video upload galleries, interactive games that keep score, etc has made me think seriously about moving my community over to one of them, just to thrill and excite my existing user base, and to attract a crowd of new users used to "tags", and "tweets", and automatically getting free widgets when they join a user community. The only thing that's held me back, really, is the backlog of 10 years worth of posts, all indexed in search engines, that can't be imported to any new software.
I know you make a solid product, and kudos to you for the care you take to produce a stable, bug-free piece of code. But please, please, can't you take a look around at, if not the wave of the future, at least the splash of the present, and help us webmasters give users what they want?
For me, it's all about retaining memebrs and attracting new ones. And it's getting harder and harder to do withoutsoftware that's getting to be considered "standard".
I know coding is painful and difficult. I know things have to come one baby step at a time. But starting by adding blogs as a feature would be a little thing we could throw to users who are increasingly distracted by larger community sites with nicer features.
Thanks.
