Bringing Web 1.0 Forums Into Web 2.0 Social Networking

In a lot of ways, social networks are becoming what forums were during web 1.0. While becoming a lot less popular, there are still hundreds of extremely active forums out there on the web. When I say active, I don’t mean a few thousand members and twenty posts a day. I mean ACTIVE. For example:

Gaia Online - Forum about anime role playing
Approx 6.6 million members, 967 million posts, Top 1000 Alexa Ranking

Vault Network Boards - Forum about role playing games
626,000 Members, 112 Million posts, with 6,000 posts added daily

Forum Auto - Forum about cars (in French)
350,000 Members, 20 Million posts

These aren’t just the top few. Here is just a partial list of the active forums out there.

There is big opportunity here for these forums to upgrade to a social networking model. If done right, an upgrade could mean:

- Ability to enhance the current interactions already taking place
- Open the door for new features that before would have been very hard to fit in the traditional forum structure
- Leverage the viral nature of social networking (which means even more members)
- Leverage the press attention that social networks are receiving these days
- Re-capture some of their “dead” users
- Open more monetization possiblities

The HUGE advantage that these existing communities have, is just that, they have an existing active community to build off of. The hardest part, building and growing the community, is done. This may also mean there is opportunity for new social networks to possibly merge or team up with old forum communities to accelerate member growth. Reaching critical mass as quick as possible is a large factor in determining the success of a community. Features or deals that accelerate this process could be the critical factor.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, web 1.0, web 2.0, forums, Online Communities, Brian Balfour[/tags]