[jdelasko]

The ultimate point I am trying to make is that the developers of zoints local are shooting themselves in the foot by not making the features I mentioned an urgent priority. I realize how much development time must have spent on this product. The plain and simple fact is, that if someone wants to create personal pages that include photo albums, they will go is myspace.com. Whether you like it or not, that is who zoints local is competing with. The myspace concept is completely integrated, and very intuitive. It is what the vast majority of forum members that would even consider creating a detailed profile are used to, and they will turn away from anything that is not as easy to use. As a forum owner, I am not able to present my members with a good reason to create profiles and blog on my site, because there are too many better places for them to do it easier. I have been hoping for the last year that the zoints product would change that.

Whether you believe it or not, I probably want zoints local to be a successful product as much as anyone on the zoints team. That is why I have been so persistent about implementing features that translate into ease of use by forum members. Not to sound too crass, but a lot of forum members or potential members couldn't find their butt if it had a bell on it... they can't even figure out how to complete the forum registration process 25% of the time, so they surely will have a hard time using, an antiquated text editor.

As far as a photo album, it's NOT about who has the better implementation. It's about the end users perception of seamless integration of album pages into their profile. Profile pages are, in fact, a mini-website, and as such should be a congruous collection of pages, including the photo album. If a visitor to any given zoints profile pages must navigate away from the profile to view a photo album, they have in effect, left that mini-website. That's not good because the congruity of profile pages is then broken. I have Photopost installed on my site and it's a better photo album solution that anything built into vBulletin will ever be. Even though it's the best photo forum available, it's useless as far as an integration into profile pages goes... it's a seperate product.

Bottom Line: Integration of features and ease of use is the key to making zoint local a highly successful product. I want zoints local to be a successful product, don't you? This thread had about 10 unique posters in th month of May.... that's a pretty low turnout. This thread should be going nuts with questions if forum members were using the zoints profile system.