Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
DChapman, I think we all respect what you are doing with Zoints:) I do anyway:) But when you compare it to the likes of a Virtual Highway with interconnecting routes, everyone knows that the towns people like to see business coming into their community, but not going out of it. For you, the government (lol) you want to give your people the freedom and become economically sound, but as with real life, the oul corner shop just wont be able to compete with the big Supermarket that has just opened 500 metres down the road.
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The big supermarket in this case is MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. How do you compete with huge entities like Wal Mart, Home Depot, and those enormous supermarket chains you're referring to? You band together in a loose affiliation. For instance, there is a carpet and tile store down the street from me. There's no way they could compete with Homedepot on price if they went at it alone. But because they have joined into an organization of like small tile/carpet stores across the country (I think it's called Carpet One or something like that) they get the buying power of the huge affiliation and can compete on price.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
The customers start to go to the bigger shops where they can get everything that was in the smaller, specialist shops but it's more convenient because it's all under the same roof.
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Sometimes, yes. That's why MySpace now has over 120 million members and most forums are seeing flat activity rates despite increasing numbers of registrations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
This relates to traffic being taken away from the smaller sites with zoints and probably ending up at a bigger site with a broader range of forums where people can get responses to their questions quicker and everything else that a bigger site has over the smaller guys, by just using the one account to log in to.
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It's about carving out your niche and differentiating yourself. If you start a forum that is exactly like 35 other (and larger) general discussion forums on the net, then you're likely going to fail with or without Zoints. But if you create a general discussion community that is somehow different and offers what others do not, then you have a chance to succeed. Zoints isn't going to make or break anyone. In the end, that rests with you and you have nobody to blame but yourself if you fail and nobody to congratulate but yourself if you succeed. We're simply trying to increase your chance of success by providing solutions that are designed to solve the three problems you WILL face: member acquisiton, member retention, and profitability. Anyone can write a hack, but nobody else has identified the exact issues forum owners face and is actively working to resolve them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
We're not putting the time, effort and money into our sites just to end up sending everyone off to the big sites, even though it could benefit the internet population as a whole, even still, there's just no point in it for us.
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Why doesn't everyone live in the big cities of the USA? Why aren't all 300 million of us in New York, Los Angeles, etc? Because not everyone likes that life. For my "home community" I personally prefer a smaller forum where everyone knows me and vice versa. And then I head off to a dozen other sites each day that cover other niches I am interested in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
If you want to look at it in extremities, Zoints could also one day be void because it's job has been done, it's brought everyone together, all the smaller sites are no more and the bigger sites can now advertise and there will be no need for Zoints or for smaller, specialist sites. This is of course an extreme but could eventually happen if things went absolutely to plan.
So I don't think this would be good for any of us.
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It's pretty simple. Hundreds of communities are utilizing the free autonomous system with quite a few more joining per day. I am deluged by requests from phpbb, invision, smf, and other communities running various software requesting to utilize this system. Many people love and share our vision. Everyone has their own preference and should do what they feel is best for their community. Zoints is innovating. We're not interested in sticking with the status quo.
Here is a good read by a VC / startup expert who I respect a great deal. How many of those can Zoints check off? ;)
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerie
(Post 1138428)
Just one thing, when you told DannyITR that Zoints Autonomous provides everything he asked for, does this include getting rid of /z/ that he mentioned too? I thought this wasn't possible?
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With the autonomous license, you can rename /z/ to whatever you want without trouble. You just can't have domain.com/username otherwise the system will break. username.domain.com is theoretically possible with a load of modifications to server settings and .htaccess, but we don't support it or guarantee it will work.
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