Above: Hooping.org Profile View
Hooping.org Forums are up in Beta testing version and I have some screenshots for you to preview.
Tribe is dead. FaceBook is… well… FaceBook. HoopCity is cool, functions very well, has a membership of over 1,500 but hasn’t become THE central hub for the community. Well, thank you Philo for re-introducing the Hooping.org Forums. The big question remains, will it become a unifying force able to pull the hooping community around a single social network or will we whither on dispersed through the web?
I got a chance to setup my profile on the Beta version of the Forum and I’ve been playing with it since. At first glance, I’m impressed. I have to admit that I fully expected the Hooping.org Forum to be introduced as another Ning Network, with all of Ning’s pros and cons. I was a bit surprised when I saw that the Forum will be hosted on Hooping.org’s own server, not utilizing a third-party service.
Forum features:
- Profile (your personal page)
- Dashboard (where you can see everything you have recently posted)
- Activity (monitor everything that is going on)
- Blog’s (very similar to Tribe.net blog’s)
- Bookmarks (share your favorite bookmarks or check out others’)
- Calendar
- Friends
- Groups
- Hoopers (members)
- “The Wire” – A twitter-like integrated status update
- Video
The Forum is scheduled to open this Monday. If you’d like to get in on the Beta testing, contact Philo through Tribe.net.
When Hooping.org launched in 2003 we originally had community forums. They were pretty active. Spiral, Baxter, Christabel, Anah, we were all in there chatting up a storm, making plans for Burning man, etc… but Hooping.org was on a fly by night server back in the day and about a year later someone hacked our forums and deleted everything. We decided that since Ariel was moderating this Tribe at the time, in addition to working on Hooping.org, that we’d just make this tribe Hooping.org’s official community space – rather than rebuild the forums. And I have to say it’s really been great!
Read Philo’s Blog entry: here
Below: Calendar
Below: Dashboard
