Just wondering what your thoughts and opinion's were on tons of sites and forums failing over the last few years? I totally think its due to facebook and twitter. What are your opinions?

Social networking sites in general, dunno about Twitter feel that's the most useless site on the web lol just updating what you do all day but the movie stars love it so I guess it has something that attracts people. Tried it, thought it was silly and getting updates to my phone all day on peoples useless info didn't interest me much. But it's ranked 14th in the world so I dunno lol

More and more mobile devices are being used for the web and majority of websites are not even mobile ready, example: 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. That's a lot of people.

Facebook and Digg are most likely the best examples of community killers although I feel Digg is slowly losing what it used to have. Then there's the thieves that steal tutorials, content and whatever else that site owners just got tired of so they pulled their sites and the recession played a huge part as well, last time I was doing dead sites via the tutorials here on P2L out of 120 sites approx 100 of those were no longer.

Forums as they are these days need something more, I have no idea what but they need something different.

BTW look at FB stats, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?sta...;_fb_noscript=1 that's pretty impressive but the site has what people want so they go there and it sits with google & yahoo as the top 3 sites in the world.

BTW these are my own views as I see them.

I wouldn't BLAME social networking, because there are ways to use them to your websites advantage, for example: an IPB script so that when you post a new thread it updates your status to "has just created a new thread "thread name" at http://www.bit.ly/whatever"

I think social networking can only help online communities, obviously, if used properly.

I am a web designer at an online DJ store and when I'm marketing, I often use Facebook, twitter & myspace to target our consumers, even though you're just "Becoming a fan" of a company e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Adobe etc. they are still going to use their thousands of fans to their advantage to advertise... so why other websites don't do this to help their community grow I don't know.

I know P2L has a group on Facebook, not sure about a fan page, but the fan page I created for my company with enough status updates and sharing, I went from 0 Fans to 900 in around 2 hours. It's not up to around 15,000 since last weekend.

It's all about working together, websites are going to come along that may crush your website, but if you work with them instead of against them, you'll find it will be a whole lot of an easier ride to just take advantage of them!

Also, yes, twitter is the biggest fail of a website since P2L Hammertime.

There, i said it...

Just my view on the situation

I just feel forums dont offer anything new to people these days, when another forum pops up, most of the time it is just another copycat, another sport/art/tutorial website. I've been there myself, a few of you may remember my photography website i started a few years back, that was just another Deviant Art or Flickr or Picasa, unless they offer something compleatly new then why are people going to join yours when there are another million on the same subject out there...

My 2 cents

True.

Also! ... where the hell is Howbad.is.it!?

That site could have been awesome!

Yep Naz. P2L has a group page on Facebook, Michael Landers started it over 3 years ago and has 56 members. Never seen a fan page and Dan is really the only one that can create that.



Don't think Hammertime was a failure, publishing system is still very active today

haha, I meant as in how it was HERE... then it was GONE. lol

Anyone can make a fan page, as long as it's approved by the company (ie. the company in question doesn't report the fan page as being a fake etc.)

Fan Pages can be pretty useful if done right, such as regular updates, interaction with the fans etc.

Maybe in the future, back when we started it we kinda just jumped in the deep end and ran into problems like having the time to work on it, money problems and potential conflict of interests. For now I am traveling so just enjoying me time and may look at restarting it in the future.

Oh and also we realised that the IMDB was going to be quite hard to take on...

I think one of the biggest differences between a forum or a site that makes it and site that doesn't is original content. Many forums tend to just have postings about stuff everyone can see on Digg or something. Then you have forums where the cool stuff originates from that forum itself.

Gotta be a creator, not a follower