The Web 2.0 Summit (formerly Web 2.0 Conference) went off to a start today in Palaca Hotel at San Francisco. One of the major traditions which has taken place at the event for the past couple of years is the LaunchPad, where thirteen startups get chosen from hundreds of entries to demo their service to the audience in five minutes. I’m going to be covering a couple of these in the sub-sequent posts, which I think stood out of the crowd.
First up is Klostu. Self-proclaimed the “community of communities,” Klostu is a centralized place for forum addicts and such. Users create a single profile on the system which they can then use as a central means to track, monitor, watch, and post on their favorite forums and conversations. In essence, it’s a social network for forum users.
Klostu features a slick drag-and-drop interface and additional features such as the ability to integrate videos from YouTube, specific groups, a shoutbox, and a networking system where you can add other Klostu users as friends and see what they’re posting.
Currently in a private beta which went live today, Klostu is definitely an interesting idea which targets a huge market. Hundreds of thousands of people post on forums and message boards everyday, and I would think a large chunk of them post on more than one. The idea, in its own niche, is quite similar to what MyBlogLog is doing with blogs.
If you’ve been or are a forum addict, you’ll know how hard it becomes to track your posts and topics. Getting an e-mail notification on each reply isn’t simply enough. And how do you keep track of not only conversations but people across multiple forums? Klostu currently seems to be one of the more valuable solutions to this.
[tags]Klostu, Forums, Social Networks, Web 2.0 Conference[/tags]
