Looking at Webcrossing Neighbors

Jim Bert, VP of Business Development from Webcrossing took me through a demo of Webcrossing Neighbors the other day. It’s a functional and tested plug-and-play social networking platform that the company provides for groups and enterprises. Reminds me of Facebook in many ways … lots of customizable pages with widgets you can add … see the screenshots below:

Jim Bert’s Homepage:

Cats and Dogs – a discussion group within Webcrossing Neighbours:

According to Jim, Webcrossing Neighbors is a truly white-labelled system with lots of customers round the world. They have added a social networking platform a couple of yrs ago which helps you manage and scale your communities online, and even handle different languages. They deal with two sorts of companies — start-up companies wanting to set up advertising based networks. And the big corporate guys. Their product is primarily geared towards larger communities, with at least 10K members.

Here’s an example of how much customization is possible around their platform – Carspace, which has 86000 members:

They plan to ramp up their video offerings and also focus on gaming widgets for enterprise customers. Other companies they are providing platforms for – Cisco Systems, Intuit, Adobe, The New York Times, WebMd.

So what does all this cost – it starts at 20 cents per member per month — if you start with less than 1000 members. The cost per member goes down when you have a 1000 and it can go down to almost 3 cents a member per month. $995 is the one-time fee. Hourly rate of $175 for customization. You will need someone to do your html and css sheets. They also provide trial sites free of cost – Jim has offered me the use of a private group for one of my research projects.

Support hours are only 12 hours US time – that’s something they need to ramp up, for a global world!

My overall take on this:

It was really encouraging to see this step-up from Webcrossing – I was part of a global team that used their earlier platform for collaboration on a research study a couple of years ago, led by Social Solutions. This was sooo much better than what I had used earlier, and going in the right direction.

While the product itself looks fairly cool, I do believe there’s lots more they can do. From my short exposure to the examples Jim exposed me to, I didn’t hear the words or see very much that suggested to me that this is a true 2.0 platform. While there were blogs and groups and rss, I didn’t see much smart use of tagging, and any widgets that help their communities and clients listen better.

After the conversation, I was left intrigued enough by Jim’s demo to me, to learn more about the company, get reference points and visualise exactly what it can do. And to help me frame it better against other products I am exposed to – like Ning or PeopleAggregator etc. So I starting searching for ‘webcrossing neighbors’ on technorati and google, as I wanted it to lead me to conversations to enable a better understanding of user experiences. I found literally NO mentions about the product in blogs. The only mentions were paid ads for the product.

It left me with the question about why they weren’t encouraging a cross-fertilization of ideas in healthy user and developer communities. There seemed to be no obvious sharing. This becomes even more important when they are targeting smaller start-ups. They aren’t really encouraging conversations and buzz around their product, nor are they engaging with so many bright minds in this space (on blogs for instance), who are so ready to share their excitement over all sorts of products and services, if they see some value in it.

By failing to engage their users in a conversation that spills out into the broader world, it impacts their capability to attract and capture new users to their community. If you’re interested in building your brand today, you must use your users to share in visible conversations. Because there is no visible conversation, it is harder for a new customer to learn. By contrast, if people are sharing and having a conversation about how the community is developing, widgets they are using, even css and hml hacks – a vibrant community is much more attractive to me as a new user.

This reminds me of the difference between Movable Type vs WordPress – MT doesn’t seem to have the visible, transparent conversations in community like WP does. Even if they may have these conversations in the backend in their forums, the fact that this is not visible to a new user searching for solutions.

Just yesterday, Stuart and I had a great conversation with Toby Bloomberg, and one of the challenges we all shared in that call was around how to cut out white noise and provide plug-and-play solutions to our Clients – this product has the potential for it – but it needs to be ‘out there’.

I also spent some time on the product website, and was a little surprised at the lack of visuals and conversations and community feeling. And no blog from their developers or marketing team .

At the end of the day, their page doesn’t reflect their Webcrossing Neighbors community right up front. Especially when so much is being done behind the scenes and hence, not visible.  My advice to them … to re-borrow Jim McGee’s phrase … start living in these social technologies!

Tagged as: , brand2.0, carspace, enterprise2.0, jimbert, webcrossing, webcrossingneighbors