YaBB taking over Facebook and Twitter? Yes it can.
Bill Myers wrote on Feb 28
th, 2013 at 8:43am:
I've posted this here because I was breaking away from the topic referenced above.
On the topic of YaBB enabling you to transform your board into a website, there was a time a few years ago when I seriously thought of archving one of our busiest websites in favor of having it continue solely through our forum. My thinking was to hand off the site's operations to a group of members who would then manage the site for me through the forum.
Relatively speaking, this would be easy to do compared to how a traditional site is/
has been operated.
My thinking? Change our site into a Facebook-like or Twitter-like participation, but do it with YaBB. After all, YaBB's interface is a much more organized way to present a world-wide town hall environment.
If any of you remember
Geocities, those online communities grew so rapidly that within a few short years they became the third-most visited site online. Our most popular site actually came about because a rather large group of communities within Geocities wanted autonomy, and I gave it to them.
If I had the use of YaBB back in 1997 when I first organized this autonomous group, I may very well have organized our site solely through YaBB's interface.
Could YaBB have handled all of the traffic? How many members could it have contained?
Those aren't the questions to ask.
Facebook's founder certainly didn't ask those questions. He just forged ahead. The founders of Twitter probably asked those questions, but by then there were ways to handle all of the traffic, and there were ways to manage their membership database.
The question to ask about YaBB is,
"How well can it organize a community?"Arguably, YaBB is
much better at this than Facebook or Twitter.
Imagine if the deep pockets of either one of those companies provided financial backing to integrate YaBB into its software. The only condition? YaBB itself would have to remain an open source project.