Tangler’s Distributed Forums

At times, it seems as if the whole Web 2.0 movement has completely bypassed the forum world.  The forums that I frequent still run the same software they were running in 2000.  They are walled gardens, with clunky interfaces, and a surprising lack of features.

This is shocking on a number of levels.  Forums were in many respects, the original Web 2.0 sites, allowing members to post and share content long before the term Web 2.0 even existed.  Additionally, forums still do MASSIVE traffic – the fact that forum software still looks very much the same as it did a few years ago is a mystery. 

From an entrepreneurial perspective, I look at a vertical with fat and happy incumbents with old software, and I see an opportunity.

Apparently, I'm not the only one.  Enter Tangler.

Yesterday, Tangler announced an embeddable version of their forums that lets folks inject community (in forum format) into any web page.

Why is this a big deal?  It’s a big deal because it frees up forum discussion to happen on a distributed basis.  As opposed to forcing potential forum participants to go to a single domain to join a discussion, they can do so in flow, on the domains that they frequent.

For example, any blogger that wants to allow their readers to discuss Tangler’s embeddable forums could just click the “share” link on the forum discussion below and embed the same discussion on their own site.  It’s neat, it’s easy, and the forum embeds are easy on the eyes.

From an end user perspective, the biggest benefit is the potential for a single login (and post history) to span domains.  If a site is using the Tangler forum embed, I’ll never have to login, and I’ll never have to worry about diluting my forum reputation (in this case, post history), across multiple systems.  Theoretically, this could lower the barrier to participation.

Could this be a rival to blog commenting services like Discus, Intense Debate, and CoComment?  I don’t see why not.

This concept of cross domain web services, with a single login, and a single user reputation system, and perhaps backed by a sturdy home base community…. Well, I think this is a nice model, and one that applies to all sorts of features – forums, reviews, gaming, communication, etc.  Another thing that is interesting about Tangler’s implementation here is that it is a good old fashioned widget powered implementation, as opposed to Facebook / OpenSocial driven.

See below for a sample Tangler embed.

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