Sites like Myspace and Facebook are lousy from a forum perspective.
Caveat: I don't use any of the social media and I don't tweet. Therefore I accede to the opinions of those with experience although, from what I've read, it seems to me that we do want to get connected to the crowd who live on Facebook or other social media.
I wonder if there's a bit of blue-sky work yet to be done before we connect to one of these sites. What are the questions we should ask and answer to get an idea of what we want to be, or should be?
I think we've already asked and answered the question about connecting. The interface needs to be simple without using a separate login…which is in line with the Mac philosophy of ease of use.
However, what do we need to be once a person gets here? It seems there's a big move to equipment like iPads (Hal's iPad thread got nearly 30,000 views) but, on our site "iPad" is one of five items in one forum. Do we need to have specific forums for iPads and iPhones?
What about the operating systems? We are Mac-computer-centric but maybe we need to have a place where people easily find or search advice about iOS.
I did a bit of looking around and found some iPad sites but they lack something that is a huge advantage on our site. I didn't see the same quality of advice. We have folks who can actually help people through problems rather than some of the guesswork I saw elsewhere.
I don't think we're far from being part of the "all the topics they're interested in" for Facebook users – particularly when our indexing, searchability, categorizing et cetera is combined with the expertise available in our membership. We just want to make sure that when folks visit the first time, their experience tells them this is a place to return to.
ryck
