Posted on Wednesday, August 8, 2007 by
Michael •
Thanks to Julia Lerman for her posting yesterday on her DevLife blog (focused on the .NET developer world). Julie’s known worldwide in the .NET circles and just so happens to live in Front Porch Forum’s pilot area. A great surprise for us. She writes…
I have more than enough people to keep up with and stepped way back on my blog reading about a year ago when I realized I was losing touch with my personal friends because of my many new virtual friends.
However, there is a new social networking tool that was actually created right here in Burlington Vermont, that I joined over two months ago and I just love it! It’s called FrontPorchForum. I’ve referred to it as Facebook for grownups. But it’s really not anything like that…
It is an amazing way of connecting with your community and helping each other out… I also feel that I’ve suddenly become so much more connected to this community that I moved into almost 4 years ago. I know who lives in those houses, the name of the local blacksmith and that there are so many really interesting people living a stone’s throw away.
It is an interesting phenomenon to me because in the past six or seven years, the internet and blogging has made me part of a worldwide community of software developers… But FrontPorchForum has come full circle because it has used this same technology to bring me back into my own local community which, although initial connections are through the web, enables me to walk out my door and down my road and meet up with many new friends and neighbors.
I’ve already talked to [the FPF founder] about what he’s going to do when it goes nationwide or even worldwide; what technologies he’s vested in currently and what is on his mind for scaling out. Because as far as I’m concerned, that is inevitable!
Which led to this posting from Johan in Sweden…
The number of social networks on the net has exploded… It’s too many networks and ways for communication. So what will the future bring us?… I think smaller networks with a base in your community could be the next thing. I think many users are fed up with the giant communities. I found this post from Julia Lerman that talk about an existing network that has a good idea. She writes “I realized I was losing touch with my personal friends because of my many new virtual friends”. I can recornize this. She talks about Front Porch Forum. Julia describes the network like this “What FrontPorchForum focuses on is your very local community. It creates an online forum, also distributed every few days in an email, that allows you to connect to your neighbors. So the people in my town of Huntington are the only people who’s posts I read and who see my posts (and my email address)”.