janc
|
|
Hosting Electric Minds?
| 
Dec 30 04:33 UTC 2000 |
I just wandered around to E-Minds for the first time in a year or so.
The summarized history of E-Minds: In the beginning Marcus wrote Picospan
for M-Net, and then sold the rights to NETI who used it to launch a for-profit
conferencing system called Arbornet, which failed to make money and eventually
became a non-profit and merged with M-Net. NETI tried again with a system
in San Francisco called The Well, which succeeded pretty darn well. One of
many large mouths on The Well was Howard Rheingold who wrote the book on
Virtual Communities based on his Well experiences and then convinced some
venture capitalists that a new free virtual community on the web would be a
great way to make money, and started "Electric Minds", with a Well-like
culture, a big media splash, and pretty graphics. Curiously enough there
didn't seem to be any money to be made in free virtual communities, so the
money dried up and the doors were closed. Except during it's brief glorious
career, while failing to make money, Electric Minds succeeded in making
community. The users wanted it to continue to exist, and so found a way for
it to happen. The name, some of the pretty graphics, and the conferences
moved over to a service named communityware which seems to have morphed into
something else since I last looked, but still exists, and still has a decent
sized group of active users.
So I wandered over there today, just at random, and got a message from the
management popping up that says "Electric Minds will be turned off on January
31, 2001". Apparantly someone else noticed that they weren't making any
money, and therefore didn't deserve to exist. This news flash came through
just a few days ago. Folks there are scrambling looking for a new home, and
furiously backing up their conferences to their own computers.
So here's my idea - not really discussed with anyone there yet: maybe Grex
could host them. They probably wouldn't earn us any money either, but since
when do we care?
They're used to a conferencing system very similar to Backtalk. Some of them
are old Picospan users from the web. They have 13 conferences, with no name
overlap with our conferences (Commons,Playground,Electric People,Altered Minds,
Electric Learning,Mind Warp,Electric Words,MojoZone,Technos,360!,Barnraising,
Flash!,CommunityWare Comments). I could build a Backtalk interface that
looks a bit more like what they are used to, make them feel at home. It
shouldn't be too hard to import their archived conferences. I don't know
how many users they have, not above 40 really active ones, I'd guess. Grex
would hardly notice them among the 27,000 we've already got.
Probably they'd want some administrative control over their conferences.
Big deal. We make their people fairwitnesses, and promise to create any new
conferences they ask for (no big concession, since our policy is already to
make anybody any conference they ask for). The biggest minuses for them
would be that some of their users probably couldn't keep their old beloved
login names (with 27,000 users, a lot of names are taken, and "fattymoon" is
more than 8 characters - "fattymoo" just isn't the same), the slight
turgidness of our net connection, culture-clash issues, and loss of identity
issues. Only negatives I see for us are culture-clash issues, and I think
those would be at least as much positive as negative.
Actually, this is so little of a stretch for us, that they could, in theory,
move here without asking us - create their accounts, ask for their confernces,
and proceed with business. We wouldn't mind. The only non-standard
services they'd possibly be looking for is to import their old archived
conference items and text, provide some Eminds home pages, maybe a segregated
Eminds conference list for people who enter through an Eminds door (only
for Backtalk, not Picospan). Nothing terribly tricky.
Reactions?
|