This site-wide feature displays user presence on every page throughout a web site by way of a persistent presence bar that sits at the bottom of the site. Wherever the user is on the site he can receive instant notifications when users sign on and off, encouraging social interaction and user engagement.  

“The Userplane Presence Bar provides a new way for sites to enhance the messaging experience for their users,” said Darin Ohlandt, General Manager, Userplane. “With Presence Bar, a user is just one click away from seeing who’s online and starting a conversation. We are excited to deliver this form of community interaction to users wherever they are on a site.”  

Userplane publishers can configure the Userplane Presence Bar to match their own site’s look and feel. Additionally, developers can customize with enhanced capabilities or add new components to the Presence Bar for additional functionality.  

In related news, sites using Userplane Webmessenger can allow users to sign in with their AIM screen name to see and chat with all of their Userplane and AIM buddies from one central user list. With the new Userplane Webmessenger, any user can combine their Userplane and AIM contact lists.    

Userplane products can be white-labeled, offering customization options for unique business model and branding needs. Like all Userplane applications, Webmessenger gives web sites full administrative control and allows easy integration with existing authentication and member databases.  

The Social Networking Conference is holding their annual iDate Miami event and Userplane is going!  It’ll be held at the Miami Beach Convention Center on January 22-23, 2009.  With the event’s focus on increasing online community size and revenue, come and listen to a great lineup of speakers.  They are highly qualified experts in the social networking industry to speak about all forms of management, internet/mobile technology, and marketing for the social networking and social media industry.  What’s better than iDate Miami where you can get a tan while working?

Let us know if you plan on getting your social networking on and would like to meet up!  For more information on the event, please visit their website: www.SocialNetworkingConference.com

Until next year, the Userplane team wishes you all Happy Holidays!

The Washington Redskins site (www.redskins.com) is the team’s official web home, largely dedicated to content.   By embedding Userplane’s Minichat application within articles at the site, users can see and participate in live chat among readers as they view those articles.  “Enabling the Redskins’ fiercely loyal fan base to interact with one another has proved to be a true enhancement for our online community.  Live chats are encouraged around up-to-date topics and news about the Redskins, which helps engage our members further,” said Shripal Shah, Vice President of Marketing Strategy for the Washington Redskins:

 

By contrast, a fan site dedicated to Boston’s MLB team (www.weareredsoxnation.com) is part of a larger social networking community called WeAre.us, and offers chat rooms using Userplane Webchat and instant messaging powered by Userplane Webmessenger.  A popular website for San Francisco football fans (www.49ersfaithful.net), powered by KickApps, offers Webchat during live games.

We’ll post some more screenshots soon! 

As you can see, they did a great job skinning and resizing the app to suport a seamless experience:

Another great integration of Userplane Webchat and Minichat.

Since the inception of the Internet, bulletin boards have changed very little. You post, you refresh waiting for a reply, you wait, you refresh, you wait, you refresh. It’s easy to see why your visitors can easily become bored with your discussion forum.

Userplane’s message board blows that tired technology out of the water with the introduction of Real-Time Posting. Just as it sounds, Real-Time Posting means your visitors see posts as they happen, with no delay, and no need to refresh their screen. Imagine how engaged your Community will be when they can communicate live with each other.

But the live communication doesn’t stop there! We’ve actually built an Instant Messaging component right into the message board, so any of your visitors can start a one-on-one conversation with another. Your site can become the place where your users come to “meet” and chat regularly.

What if your visitors could take a piece of your bulletin board with them? That’s exactly the concept behind Embeddable Boards. Any of your users can take a thread they started or are simply interested in, and embed it into their own website. They can then monitor the full, ongoing thread, yet must return to your site to post and participate in the discussion. This can help increase your User Views, Page Views, link popularity, and overall site stickiness.

But what good are User Views and Page Views if you’re not “getting credit” for them? Userplane Boards has taken care of that as well. With comScore Integration you won’t lose a single UV or PV, which along with the deep content inherent in a quality message board, imagine how it can improve your SEO… possibly more new visitors without the expense of attracting them.

Of course what good is a message board if it stands out on your site like a sore thumb? With Advanced Skinning options, Userplane Boards allows you to make your message board match your site… exactly. This maintains the continuity and professionalism your Community has come to expect.

Maybe you already have a bulletin board, but switching over to Userplane Boards couldn’t be easier. In many cases, Data Migration is just a matter of a few clicks. Your new Userplane message board will be up and running in no time!

As a site owner, you already know a message board can be quite taxing on your precious resources. Not Userplane Boards! Why? Because we’re including Free Hosting with every message board. You embed the board on your site, and we provide the bandwidth to run it. You simply sit back and watch your Community interact.

All of the cutting-edge features of Userplane Boards were designed with one thing in mind: user engagement… getting your visitors to stay longer and come back more often.
That’s the key to building a tight, loyal, and growing Online Community.
So whatever type of site you’re running, Userplane Boards can be an impactful addition to it.

To get a jump on your competition, get your free Userplane message board now!

http://www.userplane.com/boards

We look forward to hearing of your success!

Well, Userplane’s Boards are built around the fundamental principle of real-time communication. Nobody likes old news, bakeries sell yesterday’s goods at half price, and no one here’s about to swap out their Macbook Pro for a wicked fast Pentium 286!

For us, real-time communication was paramount for the product.  We live in real-time, communicate in real-time, and damnit we wanted a discussion group product to match! To do this we chose a brand new technology from Adobe – the LiveCycle Data Services or LCDS for short. LCDS was built around the need for a highly scalable real-time data  solution for rich internet applications. Perfect we thought, for the system to drive a live, improved, user experience.

This improved experience means users can see posts as they happen, without having to refresh the page. So gone are the times when you would read a post, decide to reply, type up your reply, spell check it, preview it, and then finally post it only to find there’s been like 16 other responses to the same thread in the time it took you to write yours.  Now your comment seems out of context and puny compared to the real, robust discussion occurring.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. This happened to all of us and formed the basis for developing a new and improved message board.  One designed around real-time communications that could reflect the live conversation going on. Something fresh and dynamic that could keep up with the users’ comments and interests. Think iPhone rather than brick phone.

The app’s coming out soon. Check out for yourself how the real-time boards make all those other forums look like something your daddy posted to back in 1994!

Userplane’rs were fired up with our friends and family in the stands cheering us on. A special thank you to all those who came out to support us! And a question for the Rubicon people… can you say “rematch”?

Well clean yourself up and get ready. The Userplane discussion forum has gone into QA! With such a rich feature set, you wouldn’t expect us to release a buggy bulletin board, now would you? No way! By the time you embed Userplane’s message board into your website, integration will be painless and functionality will be at the level of perfection you’ve come to expect from Userplane applications.

During the QA process, our team will be focusing heavily on our bulletin board’s real-time posting feature. What is real-time posting? It’s the defining characteristic you won’t find in any other discussion forum available today! Simply put, with a real-time message board you see posts as they happen… unlike every other bulletin board out there where you need to refresh the page every time you want to view a new post.

Another landmark feature QA will pay close attention to is the instant messaging system, which is built right into the message board. When one of your discussion forum visitors wants to chat with another, at the click of a button they can open up a private one-to-one conversation with them. This takes the bulletin board to a new level, essentially creating two application within one.

Some of Userplane’s message board features are already out of QA! The ability for your visitors to embed images, video, and formatted text within the discussion forum threads has been scrutinized and deemed flawless. Advanced skinning, the ability for you to customize the look and feel of your bulletin board, has also passed through QA with flying colors.

Due sheerly to the time demanded, several of the message board features will remain in QA until enough data has been collected and disseminated by the forum. These include attributes such as persistent content, which allows the search engines to index the content of every post on your discussion forum from day one, forward. In conjunction with search engine indexing, persistent content is also tied to ComScore rankings of User Views and Page Views. So it’s easy to see why these bulletin board features by nature require more time.

Lastly, since Userplane is going to host your message board, relieving you of bandwidth costs and overly-taxed resources, our tech team is hard at work running QA on our servers, which will be dedicated solely to our bulletin board site owners. By launch time, you can rest assured that your discussion forum will be up and running 24/7 and your data will be safe and secure.

So there’s the latest update on Userplane Boards. Over the coming months you’re sure to hear a lot of buzz about this one-of-a-kind message board, and rightfully so. It’s a bulletin board that has no equal.

Don’t forget, Userplane Boards is set to release on August 4, 2008. If you would like to be among the first the get a Userplane Board, please visit us at: http://www.userplane.com/boards/

That was then, this is now. Userplane, the leader in application platforms for online communities, announces the upcoming release of Userplane Boards. Userplane has applied its cutting-edge technology to create a bulletin board with features unrivaled by any other provider in the industry. First and foremost, Userplane Boards operates in real-time, completely eliminating the need to refresh the page to see updated posts. Instead, you see posts as they happen. Think of it like a chat room. This feature alone is guaranteed to make your site more sticky.

But Userplane’s bulletin board does not stop there. With the click of a mouse, users can communicate with each other privately via an instant messaging system built right into the board. And while they’re posting to various threads, they can feel free to include images, videos, and custom formatted text. To add to the message board’s flexibility, Userplane Boards allows advanced skinning, giving you the ability to keep the look and feel of your message board consistent with your website.

With such compelling features, it is easy to see why your site “regulars” will be absolutely enthralled with your new bulletin board. But what about generating additional traffic? Worry not, you needn’t lift a finger! Userplane Boards’ persistent content component is configured to allow the search engines to easily index the keywords from every post generated from day one. The inevitable depth of this content is sure to boost your SEO and improve your rankings. Furthermore, the message board is integrated with ComScore tracking of User Views and Page Views, giving your site even more visibility. So all you have to do is sit back and watch the traffic roll in!

So now you may be saying to yourself, “This sounds great, but the bandwidth and storage costs are going to kill me!” Well Userplane has covered that too. Every bulletin board comes with completely free hosting, relieving you of any costs or resources associated with the board. You simply embed the message board into your site, and Userplane takes care of the rest.

Whether you are looking to build a casual community or a behemoth that rivals MySpace and Facebook, Userplane Boards is the clear choice. With a rich feature set certain to engage your visitors, the flexibility of total customization, and the lack of any costs, Userplane Boards will quickly become the new Gold Standard.

Userplane Boards is set to release on August 4, 2008. If you would like to be among the first the get a Userplane Board, please visit us at: http://www.userplane.com/boards/