The Moderators have been building and testing "The Lair" behind the scenes for 12 months (off and on).

I realize it isn't perfect BUT its been clear for quite some time that we need much better functionality to support our growth than YahooGroups alone can provide us.

Since LinkedIn Management still hates us as much as ever, we can't count on them for anything.

Therefore, we have to go it alone as far as taking some responsibility for our own infrastructure requirement.

PROBLEM #1: membership profile management

As of today there are nearly 2000 Lions and yet our invite list was still under 1000. The reason is that YahooGroups is just too difficult and time consuming to maintain these lists. (The Moderators do have day jobs... )

Even if we continue to use YahooGroups for "push news" it would still make more sense to maintain our membership lists here because it's entirely automated. We can even allow much more specialized or granular lists which are automatically kept current and used for people wanting to control the growth of their connections (ie by Industry, Profession, etc) while still maintaining opt-in lists for those who accept ALL invitation.

Remember: If we are REALLY Open Networkers, we should also be open to those who may be a bit LESS Open. Our New Profiling system solves this issue.

YahooGroups just wasn't designed for these functions, we were always pushing the limits of their capabilities.

Hopefully, The Lair will address these needs, as well as provide us a much more functional and scalable platform moving forward.

Any thoughts?

Post edited by: admin, at: 2007/06/13 12:50