Let's back up and look at the most basic uses of a microforum built on Laconica.
Suppose we have a local Alpha-Roméo club. Further suppose they have an active forum built on the excellent the
phpBB. What could our Elm Street Alpha Club ("ESAC") possibly do with a microforum?
Realtime news
First, insert feeds from the existing traditional forum into the ESAC Microforum using
TwitterFeed. This excellent service will take an RSS feed and post it automatically on your Laconica instance. The forum titles with links to the posts are now available without visiting the forum. Suppose you're the admin of that forum. You can look at what's going on there simply by monitoring the Laconica instance.
Other client apps
I need to pause here to mention something I find crucial to the choice of Laconica as a platform: the fact that
Twhirl works perfectly with it. If our club members want to be on Twitter and monitor their club site, they can do this in two different windows with Twhirl. The Twhirl client also refreshes automatically and takes up less space in a window.
FEED ME!
But why stop at the forum post feed? You can insert any feeds, so we could add the official Alpha-Roméo blog feed, and anything else of interest to members, like their own blogs. In effect, we have a sort of RSS feed aggregator on our ESAC Microforum. Why not add Flickr feeds, Utterli feeds, whatever else you care about.
We can now picture ESAC members checking the ESAC Microforum from time to time to see what's new. The Laconica instance, with or without the RSS feeds, is something like a shoutbox on some forums. So, with our club members looking in from time to time, suppose one needs a tail light cover? She might "shout" that out "Anyone got a tail light lens for a 669SL?" and from there either a realtime answer comes back within a few moments of she can receive a notification by email, private message or even SMS.
The fictitious ESAC Microforum in our example acts as both an aggregator of published niche or "vertical market" information and a social network. There are many tools out there to make this even more useful. Tools that allow you to record a phone message or upload an audio file to a site like
Utterli which then will post that recording to your microforum.
The whole usefulness of Laconica comes from the the fact that it is based on an open standard. While there are others like OpenMicroBlogger, they differ in the level of integration in the current world of online microblogging, the prime example of which is Twitter.
The difference between Twitter and the other sites is one of control and distributed computing. Our little club microforum does care about these things, even though they don't need to understand them. Our club microforum will be up even if Twitter is down. It can communicate with other clubs and even with Twitter.
Autopost to Twitter
If club members wish to do so, they can configure their account to automatically post whatever they say in the club microforum to their Twitter account. This is especially useful if they would basically be talking about the same things on Twitter as they will in the club.
Enlarge the club's network via Twitter
We all know how huge Twitter is in numbers. If club members are posting to Twitter at the same time, they may find they are attracting other like-minded people to their local club microforum. Bringing in new members via Twitter is an unexpected gain of the microforum installation.
