RE standalone forums will be essentially dead
They'll only be dead if their participants are or they no longer care to participate.
In either case ...
I see the same pattern happening to standalone forums that happened to pre-Internet bulletin board systems: the population of users is aging, the influx of new members is slowing, and the overall traffic is spiraling the drain. I think both will happen--new people will no longer participate and the existing people will die or move on.
Sites like Myspace and Facebook are lousy from a forum perspective. There's very little that can really replace a forum like this; compared to this kind of software, the user interface is lousy, the forums aren't searchable, Facebook groups aren't indexed by Google, and keeping topics in separate categories is difficult or impossible. So for a forum like FTM, what we have is head and shoulders above what Facebook can offer.
On the other hand, for a lot of people, especially people relatively new to the Internet, Facebook might as well *be* the Internet. Folks like it because in just one place they have all their friends and all the topics they're interested in, plus games and apps and most of the rest of what they do online. It makes coming to a standalone Web site forum seem positively archaic.
So here's the million-dollar question: What would it look like to combine the size and socially connected accessibility of Facebook with the user interface, searchability, and indexability of forum software like this? I suspect there's a lot of money for whoever answers that question.
Some of the ideas I have in the back of my mind include:
- The ability to log in here with Facebook Connect, which would let Facebook users use FTM without creating a whole separate login.
- A Facebook page that redirects to FTM.
- A standalone app that allows users to use, post, and search FTM from their desktop without firing up a Web browser.
- Some kind of app or plugin for Facebook (I don't know anything about Facebook app development) that gives Facebook a group system that doesn't suck, and/or makes FTM available to users from within Facebook. I don't know if that's possible or not; I've never investigated FB's programming API.
- A whole new platform that does for forums what Facebook does for social networking. I'm not sure of a forum-specific platform would be a good idea or not. At the very least, it would be massive amounts of work for something that might fizzle. (Ning.com tried doing a social networking platform to compete with Facebook. It failed spectacularly.)
