Possible model for SCN?

[Steve]

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Web Neighborhoods
www.membersites.com

PC Magazine 12/1/98 


Community has always been an important part of the online experience.
With the success of the Web, personal home pages have become a hot
commodity. As a result, we're now starting to see a new breed of
online community.

One such community is Interactive Toaster's MemberSites, which is
user created and managed and includes the basics of online
interaction, such as chat rooms, newsletters, events calendars,
message boards, member directories, and photo albums. MemberSites also
includes publishing tools and community-management features.

To start our own online community, we registered via a simple form
and then proceeded to build our site. Setup was easy; we were able to
customize the name of our site, our welcome messages, and our time
zone.

We were also able to choose from a wide selection of site graphics,
but we couldn't upload our own for the site itself, although we could
add graphics to our photo album.

Once we had the basic pieces of our site in place, we started playing
with the interactive and publishing elements. First we created a
newsletter. You can choose an HTML-formatted newsletter (for those
who prefer to do the coding themselves) or a less-advanced option
that let us add text and graphics without knowing HTML.

We then set up an events calendar. The calendar, which has month or
year views, can be updated at any time, and we found setting up events
quick and easy.

MemberSites' Web-based bulletin boards are somewhat primitive
compared with the more elegant examples found on services such as
CompuServe. The lack of real threading is a disadvantage, and we
noticed that bulletin board pages loaded slowly over a dial-up
connection. We did appreciate, however, the option to e-mail replies
about a specific topic.

MemberSites also comes with a standard chat room, which doesn't
provide avatars or other graphic chat elements but should serve the
needs of most users. MemberSites also offers users an instant
messaging capability.

MemberSites is part of the new wave of products that empowers users
to build their own communities. Stop by MemberSites: You might just
find yourself moving into the neighborhood.

Price: Free
Interactive Toaster Company Inc, Boca Raton, LA

Copyright (c) 1998 ZDNet



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