Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
[*]What will the future bring to us all?
I'm quite curious to see what others will have to observe about the current health and membership of other forums out there. Personally, I enjoy the format of being able to pull up the forum on a large screen with a real keyboard and read.
As far as the future, I think until cellphones begin projecting large dynamic displays, any text based communication which requires visual processing is going to be more & more truncated, skimmed, disregarded, and not well internalized.
Many people have small screens which have even smaller keyboards. This increases typos, the time it takes to edit posts & add legible formatting, let alone to edit forum brackets / BB code and shorten quotes .
Additionally, smaller buttons and smaller screens mean that people will naturally overlook details, such as "Thanks" and "Quote"-- there is a very ergonomic component at play here that I am seeing influence quite a bit.
Case in point. Here is a slice of youtube's analytics for a youtube channel. The image compares devices used on that same youtube channel.
This is a 28 day time period. Notice that desktop & phones are nearly equal:
This is where we are headed. More people are sticking to mobile phones, but average view duration (how LONG people stay on any one thing) is the lowest out of all of the device types. This is startling to me.
Notice the larger the display (TV) the longer the view duration?
I'd be really curious to see similar analytics for more text-based formats, such as forums. I wonder if the same metrics would hold?
I think that future dynamic platforms that allow people to click less and type less will win the attention and TIME competition game that is happening online right now.
I do not think that forums will become a fossil, however I DO think that technology itself will CONDITION people into naturally putting less value in focus and concentration, and more into visual & thinking heuristics just to process everything that draws the eye.