i don't think this will displace forums. The key for forums, is users, everything else is fluff.

And existing forums won't be switching to this, because they just can't. Technology won't work together, and few admins would switch if they could.

So their main "target" are the people who want to start new communities, and that's a very fickle audience(I got in on the early beta of Stack Exchange, which had a similar hook, new forums! and ~2 months later, 90% of sites have been abandoned, because it's very hard to get early users.

Starting a community is much harder than people think. Forums take years to build up...and most people just don't want to deal with that, since there is no light at the end of the tunnel(most forums are barely breaking even)

The widget part, does have some merit, but at that point, it's pretty much sounds like a disqus/intense debate copy.

Analytics part doesn't really matter since you can get that already with other software+google analytics.

Insights, even though interesting, doesn't really do any value add to the user or the admin, so once again fluff.

Frankly I don't see why they are going for the forums market, vBulletin barely makes any money. They are like THE forum software, and I don't think they make more than 10 mil in revenue.

I've personally worked with the three founders during a stint as a consultant for MySpace. They've all incredibly smart technologists and strategists with proven experience on creating community - MySpace is after all probably the first mega community that formed on the Internet (OK, you might not be a fan of MySpace and the type of community it created - but you can't argue they were successful in their hay-day)

The details are sketchy on how this is really going to be implemented - and as a start up founder myself working on a stealth product I understand that there is little reason to give before launch all the implementation details us techies want to know.

I agree this might be difficult to bite into the core vBulletin/PHPBB communities but I also feel a lot of people are migrating away from them as the conversations spread out over blogs comments, google/yahoo groups, etc.

I don't actively use any vBulletin/PHPBB communities anymore - do you?

The API aspect of this has the ability to get traction within the more distributed conversations going on, and they'll be able to provide sophisticated search on top of that -- which is what excites me the most.

We'll see but I'm keeping an eye on this.

but they didn't create the myspace community, they jumped in the phase when they were already hiring senior level execs(the only early guy, is on the tech side, and joined it at 300,000 users), and it's quiet different growing a community from a few million users compared to growing a community from 0. The hardest phase of any company, are those first 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 users. After that 100,000 user mark, as long as your site is viral enough(like myspace), you'll continue growing at XX,XXX users per week.

and it's not really them, that I'm talking about, I'm talking about their future users, the admins, who'll be implementing this to start their own forums. Those are the guys that will have a huge churn rate, that will use the system for 1-2 weeks, before shutting the site down, due to lack of users.

And yes I use plenty of forums, message boards are the only avenue that you can use just for discussion. Sure there are other things that focus on something else and allow discussion(i.e. HN, where the key goal is submitting articles), but if you want to discuss something you gotta hit up those outdated forums. The comments in blogs etc, are really not the same as an actual discussion on forums. I've read a 10,000 posts forum thread. I've never read a blog post that had more than 50 comments, since there is no way to hold a discussion, just a bunch of +1 comments.

The api thing excites you as a techy, but almost all of the forums are run by fans. Camaro fans, harry porter fans, excersize fans, the words API are like magic to them, they mean nothing.

Yeah it's still up in the air, and can go either way, but I just don't see any mass adoption or mass revenue in their future. Any business that relies on their users starting communities, has a very long road ahead of them. Granted their goal is probably just scale(like ning), where they have a few million communities, but each with 5-10 people.

If they really manage to optimize it for conversations, then it could have a future. I'm one of those crazy people who think that NNTP was the greatest thing to ever hit the net, and still hold that nothing has yet to come close to match in the ability to let people actually converse over longer periods of time. Most web forums seem, by design, to actively discourage long running conversations. Some even go so far as to forbid posting to a thread that is more than X days old. Everything seems to be geared towards hit and run postings and a quick question-and-answers format.

I've often pondered why NNTP and newsreaders was so much better at this than HTTP and web browsers, and haven't really found an answer. The pessimistic part of me sometimes thinks that it's simply because people on the internet where better and smarter in 1999 than in 2009, but I doubt that's completely true. If someone else can solve this problem and make it work, I'll be the first to shake their hand and use their product.

That being said, based on the article, Gravity doesn't seem to be it.

God this idea is familiar... I remember someone trying to launch something like this a few years back. You looked for interests that you had within the system and you got back conversation threads...