Quote:
Originally posted by bhil
A sad day for SmartphoneSource, but a great day for smartphone users!
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One thing we should do is create a page somewhere for JimmyJoe to document the history of SmartphoneSource. I don't want to lose any of the heritage with this merger. The sites are nearly equal in size, so it really is a merger. Both domains will be here and work for getting to the site when everything is done. Actually, the current plan is to go to pdaphone.com as the overall name of the site and domain.... so both names would go, and a new one would emerge. I just don't want to deal with that until this is all settled. But, there is a new template in design for pdaphone.com.
Here is an edited post that I did for the moderators that gives you a little more history and information about this....
I guess the ownership change leaked out to some of you guys before everything was official, but its done now. I just want to say "Hi!" to everyone and introduce myself. I'm Mike Collins, the owner of pdaPhoneHome.com. I've been talking to JimmyJoe over the last 3-4 months about buying SmartphoneSource, and we finally got it done. I have been a longtime fan of this site, and the great community that you guys have created.
The goal of pdaPhoneHome has been to create a site and climate where owners of all pdaPhones can come together for discussion and help on all pdaPhones. None of the pdaPhones today really have gotten everything right, so our quest is for the best converged device. PPH (pdaPhoneHome) has plenty of people that are passionate about one device, and there is always a friendly rivalry between them... but we try to keep that light and open so that new people aren't intimitidated. We have a lot of hard core power users in the device forums, and we also have a lot of new people as well... we encourage new people to join in and learn. We have started some new forums for new people who don't know what they want, to let them get some information before they dive into one of the devices.
My intent is to merge the two sites, while retaining the best of both. It will essentially double the user base and content, which will be good for more discussion and fun. I am very sensitive to making the SPS members feel at home, and not feel like they are in a "new place", because it really isn't... with SPS contributing approximately half the content, it isn't a new place... just a little different. It is now, and will be vBulletin, and I'm committed to adding any hacks that I don't already have, and the SPS users really like. We do have a full mobile version today as well. If you look at the forum structure, you'll see that the merger will be very easy, and the places where SPS has a lot of activity, PPH doesn't, so SPS forums will essentially take over those forums. I will, obviously split the 6035 and 7135 content out the way it is now here.
I spent several hours on the phone last night with JimmyJoe, and Jazz in the background, and know now why this is a great place to be... they are terrific people. It was fun connecting the dots with different interactions we've had over the years, when I didn't know the players. Tonight I got to recall the last year with JimmyJoe and Jazz and it was fun. My first interaction with SmartPhoneForums was back in the early days of pdaPhoneHome. I had started the site by building FAQs for PocketPCPassion, at the request of the moderators there... they wanted them hosted elsewhere, and since I had to do a lot of work to build them... I decided to make the site more general. There wasn't a site covering all the devices, so that was the niche.
After the Pocket PC Phone was pretty well covered, I decided to branch out. I talked to one of the moderators at SmartPhoneSource... don't remember if it was HotSync or JimmyJoe... think it was HotSync and explained my idea about having a place where people could come together and learn about different phones, and that the FAQs were the way to do that. I asked for permission to publish some of the FAQs from SmartphoneSource in the pdaPhoneHome FAQ database, and we reached an agreement that I could if I stated that the source was SmartphoneSource. I did the same thing with Handspring... they too gave me permission to include FAQs if I referenced the source. As I expected, the FAQs got visitors to come look at them, but they would follow the links back to the other sites for discussions, which was the intent. That was cool, because that wasn't what we were trying to do at PPH. To this day, we still get a lot of people that come to the site via search engines to see the FAQs, and never go into the forum at all.
Over time, the Pocket PC devices started to grow in forum content to the point that the site was on the verge of becoming singularly focused. We had developed good forum traffic on some of the Pocket PC devices like the i700, but all of the Palm based forums (and the other platforms as well) were pretty low traffic. We only had a few Palm based forums... Treo, Kyocera, and Samsung... no separate forums for devices like we had with the Pocket PC devices. My belief is that it doesn't make sense to split out the devices until the traffic builds to a critical mass.
It became obvious that the only way to build the Palm based traffic and realize the vision as a place where all pdaPhone owners could come together, was to merge with an existing user base. The opportunity presented itself with SmartphoneForums this past July. That was right when SmartphoneSource had the database failure, and people got confused and thought that we had merged back then. The only problem with that merger in July was that we were on different bulletin board software. I decided that the new users from SmartphoneForums needed to feel at home, and that vBulletin was better, so I migrated the whole site to the SmartphoneForums' vBulletin base, and rewrote all my non-forum pages in vBulletin and vBindex. That was a lot more work than I imagined.
Today, I believe the site is pretty well balanced... especially on the Palm and Pocket PC devices, not so much on Symbian... and Smartphone OS is growing. The one Palm device that we haven't grown much participation on is the Kyocera devices. We also haven't had a lot of growth with downloads or the off-topic discussion. So that is why I think this will be a good marriage.
Another point where we crossed paths was when I was doing the merge with SPF and needed to migrate from phpBB to vBulletin... I sent a note over to JimmyJoe and asked about his experience. I didn't know at the time, but found out last night, that you guys switched from vB to phpBB and back to vB... wow! We are staying put on vB... it's way nicer. We got to talk about that history last night and it was fun to fill in the gaps.
With this change, I'm sure that many of the SPS members will feel uncertain and uneasy, as they would with anything that is unknown. I am commited to making them (and you) all feel welcome so that everyone will be happy and want to stay. I hope everyone sees this as a positive union the way I do. If you talk to Marctronixx who came to PPH with the SPF merger, I think he'll tell you that I've gone out of my way to make members feel welcome, and to make changes to satisfy everyone.
As for moderators, I would love for you all to continue, if you want to. We have a lot more moderators at PPH, because we cover a lot of devices and I've tried to get people that can speak to each device. That means we do have turnover because people come and go, but the core team has remained.
One big difference between the sites is that PPH does advertise. That is out of neccessity to pay for the site hosting, business expenses, give-aways, and review products. We run on a dedicated server, and just moved to a dual xenon 2.4G box a few weeks ago, so that should mean good performance with the larger database. But, with the advertising, I have gone out of my way to be as conservative as I can with it. We don't do any popups ever (if one of the ad companies slips one in, it is reported by a user, and I have it removed... usually within a couple of hours), we don't allow any bold or annoying ads, and we try to do mostly ad content that is meaningful to the site. We have some Google Adwords on the pages, and they are targeted at the content of the page. Consequently, with a forum, sometimes Google can't figure out what the content is and runs public service Adwords. I've had people say they like that, but I might change that in the future... Anyway, I hope that people aren't too turned off by the ads.
We have a lot of upcoming plans. One is that the domain pdaPhone.com is part of the site, and in fact you can use that domain today to access the site. I have a new style being developed that we will use to move to that new site name at some point. We have a very robust download engine that is in final test.
Talk to you later....