Update: Alicia Wyatt posts a quick ‘how to’ (and associated issues) for moving from EduSpaces to edublogs.
Shame that Ben and Dave couldn’t manage to keep eduspaces running.
(incidentally, if any eduspaces users want help moving over to edublogs then please feel free to email support (at) edublogs /dot/ org for assistance)
I have to say I was a little surprised by the gratitude expressed by their soon-to-be-non-users – I’d expect, personally, to be run out of town with a pitchfork in my rear end but perhaps that’s just me ;)
Still, I think it’ll be very interesting to look at the whys and wherefores of what made the site initially successful and then less so as and if Dave and Ben publish them.
My suspicions are that it was essentially a site based around a very specific community – and any community-centric site has a serious cap on the number of users it can support and all the associated issues prevalent with communities over time. What it needed to be was an educational version of Ning or Yahoo Groups, but that’s no easy task (I can tell you!), in that it could have operated as a service, as much as a community. But heck, I could be completely wrong, let’s wait to hear what they have to say.
Also of particular interest is Tom’s comment:
“Something else I keep trying to warn you about. And yes, it will happen to Blogmeister eventually. It has to.”
To which I’m not sure I agree (and left a comment asking for more info.) What’s the ‘has to’ element here? Please explain :)
[I should also note, just for the record, that edublogs continues to go from strength to strength… we completed a split over the weekend so that the site now runs off over 4000 databases (same as wp.com), are about to do a very fancy upgrade, and have some pretty exciting plans for 2008 including new partners and functionality… we’re not going anywhere, so don’t even think it!]
Well, I, for one, believe in Edublogs, James, and look forward to new developments and growth.
I had some space over at Eduspace and after some initial use, abandoned it, too, as it didn’t seem to meet my needs.
Peace
Kevin
Thanx for the belief Kevin! There’s absolutely no need to worry, even if the entire team dropped dead tomorrow (that’d need a really freak accident crossing 3 continents) there is no shortage of organisations / people more than happy to ‘take it over’ :)
same goes for Elgg btw. Eduspaces will be closing, but the open source project behind it (elgg.org) has new life as a community project. Ben and Dave have moved on to more commercially viable projects, but the users of elgg (including myself) have taken over development and will keep the torch burning for education friendly social software…
./tim
Not a great consolation to their users though is it, really? Why can’t you guys take over eduspaces?
To be honest, the shutdown of eduspaces was a surprise to us as well. I have put some feelers out with Dave/Ben to see what alternatives there could be.