Joined on 06-07-2004
TechSoup Member
I've grown more and more impressed with the way sites such as Orkut and Blogger enable each community member the chance to feature their pics, testimonials, and interests, as well as make all of their profile info indexed so that people with similar interests/geographic areas/career goals can find one another.
My org has a pretty strong online community, but a faceless one that renders our online presence a bit stale. I want to make our virtual space as personable as possible, so does anyone happen to know of any off-shelf solutions that would enable us to have searchable profiles similar to the aforementioned sites? If not, does anyone know of Web host that offers these features?
Thanks in advance for any advice,
Schroeder
Joined on 04-06-2004
TechSoup Member
http://www.barnraiser.org
http://slashster.sourceforge.net/
http://www.foaf-project.org/
....all open source, no box required.
Are you asking for a message board platform that features pictures (like this one)? Or are you wanting to build a social networking program, like orkut? It sounds to me like you are looking for a message board platform, which differs from Orkut or Blogger. The one we use is SX forums. There are many more in our
Online Community Building Tools resource list
HTH,
Susan
Joined on 06-07-2004
TechSoup Member
Thanks for the suggestions. Our org's online community consists of only message boards, but I wanted to find out ways through which we could incorporate better member profiles (pics, profiles, personal URLs, a history of postings, indexed interests, etc.). The indexed interests are key in that I'd like our community members to be able to find others who share similar interests/vocations, simply by clicking on an item listed in someone's membership profile (hence the Blogger and Friendster references).
We're not looking to reshape our online community into something that acutely resembles Orkut, Friendster, or Blogger...we're just looking to have our member profiles improved along those lines.
Joined on 10-30-2003
TechSoup Member
I've been looking for a combination message board and member directory as well. The two I seem to have come up with is www.memberclicks.com (their Mothership product) and www.infopop.com (their EVE product). Both are ASP (hosted) solutions. Memberclicks is run with an Oracle database and Infopop's eve is run on a MySQL database. I like memberclick's Mothership has a neat member directory but they are just building their message board technology. On the other hand, Infopop is using their established UBB.x message board software which includes a member registration functionality; it is doing beta testing of a member directory that is expected to go live later this year.
Neither one of them are cheap.
http://www.phpbb.com/ did you look at this ??
oz