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Let me tell you a story. Actually, I’m no good at that. Let me summarize: At the first SuperHappyDevHouse, David Weekly made PBwiki.

Well, it’s been about a year since then and we’ve had almost 10 DevHouse events. So far, the only neat project that’s come directly out of the DevHouse since PBwiki (that we know of!) is Slut-o-Meter. Hopefully our next event is going to change that. More on that later though.

What I’m really here to tell you about is JellyBB, a provider of free hosted forums. It doesn’t quite qualify as a DevHouse project because I started it the night before the last event, but I finished it as we were setting up. In fact, I think that’s why we were in the kitchen this time because that’s where I sat down to finish it.

Obviously, it’s a rip off of PBwiki, but that was sort of the point. A few of us have decided to call the process peanutbutterization, which is vaguely defined as taking an existing simple open-source project and making a web service out of it. The idea isn’t all that new, but I think the magic is the simplicity. It takes two pieces of information to set up a PBwiki or a JellyBB and then you have one ready to go instantly.

JellyBB is kind of a joke in homage to PBwiki, but the original inspiration was that I wanted to set up a forum for SuperHappyDevHouse. I figured, why set up a forum when you can make a web service to make forums for you! And if it can be done in about the same time it can take some people to set up a single forum, there’s no reason not to.

What’s the future of JellyBB? Well, before this I hadn’t actually gotten my hands dirty with social software. I’m looking forward to working on this more and making it great. There’s lots of things wrong with most forums. Mostly they’re too complex. They all seem to be made specifically for people that already use forums. However, there’s something about those kinds of forums that’s fun to me.

With JelllyBB, instead of building a simple forum from the ground up, I’m taking an existing lightweight forum that feels like a traditional forum (in this case, the marvelous PunBB) and just start trimming it down. When it’s down to its most optimal user experience, I guess I’ll upgrade it from alpha to beta.

For now, I just need to get people talking on the new DevHouse forum. I seem to have a natural ability to not draw a crowd, as you can probably tell from the fairly obvious lack of readership on this blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 10:32 am and is filed under Web, Development, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.