Re: IBM Gives RPG Devotees Their Own Café

That depends on what you are trying to deliver.

Here is my problem with a forum. I go to forum.com, sign in, look at the
main subjects for new posts, click on that topic to see the sub-topics and
click within those that 1) I have interest in and 2) that have new messages.
Now I click in there and browse through the list. I see the one I have been
following and start going through the pages until I see the last message I
read and continue reading. I read a post and try to figure out to whom this
poster was replying. At this point, my 2-second trip is now up to 5 minutes,
and I have several other topics I usually follow to check up on. Now this
might be a bit on the extreme, but is not too far off from most forums I
have used in the past.

Now we turn to another "forum" I just started using. Each post is assigned
one or more tags by the questioner. Each tag has an RSS feed. I subscribe to
each tag that I am interested in. When a question I am following comes in, I
see it in Google Reader. If I know the answer or am interested in the answer
I'll either star it or click through immediately. True it takes time to
subscribe to 5 or so tags, but the value of expanding your personal network
more than makes up for the 10 minutes it takes to do this... once. This site
is StackOverflow.com.

If you want to entice someone to use a site, push to them the content they
want. This can be either via email, RSS, heck maybe even Twitter,
FriendFeed, SMS, or Facebook. The key that I am trying to stress is to push
the information to the user, don't make them go get it. Users are lazy, make
it easy and adds value to their life and they will come. I am willing to
search a forum for information, but I am not normally willing to partake in
the site unless the data can come to me.