I’ve heard a number of people say this over the past few months and I could not disagree more. There is and will always be a lot of value in asynchronous threaded discussions. However, message boards as they exist are a dated technology much in need of an influx of some of the features and concepts that are driving the newer forms of social media.

One idea that I have been mulling over is integrating tags into message boards. It is small and hardly revolutionary, but I think it could add considerable value to the experience for everyone involved. When a user creates a thread, they add tags based on what they think the conversation they are starting is about. The tags will then be editable by everyone so how a thread is categorized can evolve with the conversation. The tags can then be used to highlight those conversations elsewhere. So if I am in one thread, I can see at a glance and browse related threads based on how closely the tags align. Similarly, they can be used to provide additional context for users on pages with other content types. For example, if I am on LeBron James’ profile page on NBA.com, I will be able to see a feed of all the conversations that have been tagged with “LeBron James”. That is a relatively simple example, but I imagine on an ecommerce site, it could become a fantastic way to let your community merchandise for you, creating another sort of recommendation engine. By connecting the tags to a user’s activity, the tags could also be leveraged to create much more robust community member segmentation than what could be gleaned from a users’ profile (I imagine you may even be able to identify where they are in the sales funnel depending on their activity). All this using a pretty commonplace technology that would be relatively inexpensive to implement. Has anybody seen anything like this before? I would love to hear some more ideas on how the message board could be improved upon.

On a side note, how awesome would it be if you came to a community site and there was a tag cloud with one of the prominent tags being “flame war”? All name calling and childish behaviour would be on display just a click away.