[Rant] The Future of Forums

Why haven't we evolved past forums? They're inefficient. They're web 1.0. It's time to move on.

The primary problem with forums is information accessibility. It's not uncommon to browse through dozens or even hundreds of posts to piece together an entire solution. Piece together. That's the key issue here. When a forum conversation is finished, the information is left in fragments instead of being aggregated into a cohesive and comprehensive whole.

Every person visiting the forum with the intent of finding that particular solution or answer must re-trace the thought process and conversation of every contributor. What would it be like if that weren't the case?

What we need is a technology that allows the conversation to evolve. Each successive contributor revisits and has the option of editing what the previous contributors wrote. At the end of the process, what began as a "how do I?" becomes a "How to Guide". Rather than sort through hundreds of posts, the collaboration of the contributors is contained in one robust post. Errors are fixed and removed. Updates replace the originals.

The technology exists. It's called a wiki. Or, if you're Google, it's called a Wave. What people need to do now is leverage that technology to replace forums.

When you call something a wiki, you lose a large percentage of your target audience. People believe they have to be experts to contribute. Wiki's aren't places where you ask questions, they're places where you share answers. They display the end result of a discovery process, but aren't used in the process itself.

Additionally, wikis don't clearly indicate who contributed what. Forums rank participants based on activity. This ranking is often associated with a status. Studies of corporate knowledge exchange sites have shown that the inclusion of rankings/points/status has a high causal relationship with the activity of site members.

I think that Google Wave, which was quickly scoffed and shoved aside, could have a very useful application - replacing forums. A Wave allows different users to contribute, satisfying their ranking/status needs, but also allows the editing of previous posts. This could also potentially allow forums to upgrade past and current threads to Wave threads without losing any content. It would allow for the consolidation of a solution. Imagine a world where the solution was all contained in the first post.

The way it is currently configured, Google Wave works like a personal inbox for collaborative materials. If that could somehow be extended to a forum-like site, it would finally get some use. And, if Google were willing to allow other sites to integrate with and build on Wave, contributors could have a one-stop destination for all their posts in all their forums/groups.