Do any real-time forum platforms exist? Forums where threads and posts appear in real time? If not, would there be an audience for such software? What kind of things would have to be avoided for this type of forum to prosper?
Forums aren't a software problem -they are inherently a sociological issue: community building & forming, spam filtering, navigating the political intentions, etc. If there's a single conclusion of Google Wave, it's that being "realtime" makes no guarantees for quality, and signal/noise; but makes management of such extremely more harder.
Right now, if you're responding to something on most forums (Stack Overflow excepted?), you can't see other responses which have come in while you're typing (not on the same page, anyway). I think a few years from now this will seem like the horribly broken behavior that it is. I wish you well.
I believe it will be hard to get audience from most existing forums, as I see most phpbb, invision, etc. aren't rushing to move f.ex. to vanilla. Most of this software is outdated and bloated, yet they have a huge ecosystem (extensions, tutorials) and userbase used to their functionality. Such product should at least provide an easy convertion schema and default themes similar to existing competition's defaults. Still it would take very long until it gained a reasonable market share IMO. If you're looking just for new market, it could succeed.
I'd see sth like that as extensions to existing platforms, yet I believe it wouldn't be fun to code that :)
That's absolutely true, I was happy after punbb appeared and later vanilla, but I know how hard it's to make even simple updates when you have a big community. I help run a 7yr old huge automotive forum and even a phpbb2->3 upgrade caused riots, I have no idea what happens when someone would switch a huge community from bb or invision to an exotic platform :)
There's a guy making a real-time fantasy football forum called SleeperBot: http://www.sleeperbot.com/. It's pretty cool. The success of one would probably depend on what it's being used for. The SleeperBot forums are great when football games are running. You would probably need some sort of reason to have a 'live' forum instead of a standard one.
I'm aware of IRC. I've hosted my own IRC server since 1999. But, I wasn't asking about IRC. Although, IRC is my inspiration for this question. I'm talking about a forum, accessible from the web obviously.
I assume you mean something like the front page of hacker news but where you could watch the positions/scores change and old items fade out as new ones take their place? I think that would be pretty slick. However I can imagine people wanting a "pause" button in case they don't appreciate the idea of things they were planning on clicking on disappearing. Were you planning on implementing this?
I'm just brainstorming for something fun to work on, at the moment.
I haven't really thought out all of the different in's and out's of it all, but I think the issue you bring up would be easily overcome. It's more of a presentation issue than something going on in the back end, I think.
Upvoted. Mike (one of the founders) is a great guy and very helpful. I currently run ninjapost at my startup (details in profile if you want to check ninjapost out).
