Quote Originally Posted by adrianh View Post
I think that if Facebook were to add topic / thread based interface as well then it would capture the forum market as well.
Open content forums have been "under assault" by "big business" for years and years already.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn have taken a dip at trying to reproduce the forum format with their groups functionality. On this front LinkedIn was the first and Facebook followed.

Google has had a couple of cracks at it. I forget the first, but Google+ is the current effort.
Yahoo! Answers has been around forever.
Microsoft Live is MS's effort.
Wikipedia isn't that far removed from a forum format...

I haven't been hanging around forum webmaster circles for a couple of years now, but it seemed at the time that Facebook and LinkedIn was certainly hurting the "anything and everything" type forums. Solidly niched and well administered community forums weren't taking a hit, but were certainly keeping a wary eye on developments. There were even pretty robust calls to stop all the various social networking and bookmarking buttons that have been part of forum products for ages now.

Then add the content aggregator sites - most of which had degenerated to questionable scraper sites. Our local example, Afrigator started off looking like a good thing, but when they started framing TFSA content within their site rather than giving previews and linking to the content, I really felt a line had been crossed. Sidenote: Just checked to see if they had changed their ways and I see they're gone now. I wonder what happened.

As all this has passed by, I've realised it's not the forum format that determines a community website's success. If it was, every forum launch would be a hit. In truth the opposite is true; exceptionally few get any traction at all. There are hordes of dead and dying forum websites out there.

Ultimately I've come to the conclusion the factors that determine a forum's (or blog's for that matter) success is exactly the same set of factors that affect small business success or failure when up against big business - which at this time of night I'm struggling to reduce to a short list.

But here goes:
Network
Expertise
Niche
Focus
Leadership
Embedded culture

Oh I give up - it's something like that. Maybe someone can help me out...
(And that's the real power and value of a community forum website)