Community: Building Blocks
by Heather Champ
Incorporating tools for community growth within a site is becoming a given
for any Web developer or designer considering a full, well-rounded useful
user experience. While ichat and Moderator (Earthweb's just released chat product)
provide a rather standard experience for users, they can very often leave a
designer yearning for a greater inclusion within the desired branding of a site.
It's true that Moderator allows for a number of "looks and feel"
alternatives, but on the whole neither of these products allows for the
complete control that most Web site developers and designers crave.
Later this week SocialScience, a
New York-based development group, will unveil NetDiscussion 1.0 within Total New York, to be followed shortly by
an implementation within Nerve.
Unlike the typical, somewhat shrink-wrapped chat, message board, and forum
software delivered to date, SocialScience has been developing a group of
building blocks that will enable Web site developers and designers to take
better control of the integration of chat environments within Web pages.
ichat and other technologies require a fair amount of Web real estate with
little or no integration with a site's content. SocialScience's applets have
been designed in such a way as to allow for the maximum flexibility for a
differentiated user experience.
The NetDiscussion building blocks are Java applets that do not require
software installation and are customizable using HTML for arrangement in a
document layout and to set the parameters that determine the design and
configuration of each block. It's similar to the various attributes of the
<BODY> tag; background color, text, and link color.
The building blocks themselves are a single-message display, a multi-message
display, a scrolling ticker display, a text input field, and a submit
button. There is also a polling component that instantly displays the
results each time a user votes. The results can be displayed in either a pie
chart and bar graph and are as easily customizable as the other
SocialScience products.
Wendell Lansford, President
and CEO, demonstrated a Java banner created with the polling component based
on the recent British elections. The live banner would display
up-to-the-minute returns. Alternately, the banner could be configured to run
on a number of sites with the possibility of users voting on any given
programmed topic.
While these may not be the first ticker or polling components to enliven
discussions or the delivery of topical information, the grouping and
flexibility of these elements together as a suite presents a wonderfully
varied palette of possibilities for designers.
While larger corporations using the more shrink-wrapped products have the
budgets to allow for customization of the standard interfaces that will mute
the overt in-your-face branding, NetDiscussion 1.0 provides a wonderfully
easy-to-use solution that will never detract from the integrity of a Web
site's design.
