Today I’m here with Mike Wilt who is one of the creators of NinjaPost.com. NinjaPost is a relatively new forum software to the forum industry world and I have to say I am really impressed with it. Today, I talk to Mike about the creation and features of Ninja Post.
Glen: Good stuff! So how are you today Mike and could you give me a brief bio of yourself?
Mike:
Thanks for speaking with me, Glen. I’m doing great and excited to speak with you. I did my undergrad in Boston at Boston College. I moved to Atlanta couple years ago to attend Georgia Tech. That’s where I learned how to program and where I met my business partner, Kent.
Glen: That’s cool. So you’re a programmer by occupation?
Mike:
Yes, well, I am now. I was a novice programmer when I started at Georgia Tech. However, it quickly became clear that if I wanted to create Ninja Post or any other of a number of projects I had in mind that I would have to learn how to code.
My forte is Javascript/Ajax, PHP and MySQL. Kent is an exceptionally talented programmer as well — truly a jack-of-all trades — so we make a good team.
Glen: You must be good programmers aswell to have Ninja post as powerful as it is. So Mike, what do you do in your spare time?
Mike:
If I’m not working on Ninja Post, I love going to the gym. I also love the beach.
I’m also a fan of the band Phish — Phish fans, much like fans of the Grateful Dead, have a long history of congregating online to analyze past concerts and speculate about upcoming shows.
Phish heads are rabid fans. But they’re also funny and intelligent and usually willing to help one another and their online communities usually share these characteristics.
In fact, my experience interacting with the online Phish community shaped the idea that evolved into Ninja Post.
Glen: The beach. I wish we had the weather for it over here. What is your top 3 favourite foods?
Mike:
I love pizza. But it has to be exceptional pizza. My favorite pizza place is Grimaldi’s in New York City.
I also enjoy a nice, high quality steak…
Finally, I have a sweet tooth. Can’t go wrong with my Mom’s chocolate chip cookies.
Regarding the beach: Atlanta is 4-5 hours from the coast so it’s a bit of a drive but worth it. Of course, if you can’t get to the beach it’s easy to find a nice pool in Atlanta since it gets so hot during the summer.
Have you been to the US?
Glen: Unfortunately, I have not. It’s something I would love to do though.
Mike:
I would LOVE to go to Scotland someday. But you’re right, it’s not the most tropical destination.
Glen:
Anything with chocolate will do me.
Yep, 90% of the year it’s rain. The forest and the outdoors are beautiful though because they do get a lot of water.
You said that your Started Ninja post because of the Phish community. When and why did you create Ninja Post?
Mike:
The genesis for Ninja Post came about years ago when I was speaking with someone about The Well — which is one of the earliest online communities. He described The Well as “Brain Jazz” — an improvised jam session in text instead of music.
This idea stuck with me, and I thought that it could be applied even more literally to forum software. Why not combine elements of chat with the structure of a traditional forum? In other words, why not create a forum that is super fast and interactive.
We wanted to make it easy for users to share knowledge with one another and we wanted to make it easy for users to forge connections with one another.
As much as the internet has changed in the last couple years, forum software has not evolved that much. But at the same time forums remain integral to the internet. With that in mind, I connected with Kent and we set out to build forum software for a Web 2.0 world.
Glen: I totally agree forums have stayed the same over the last couple of years. While there has been some major version updates from the likes of vBulliten and PhPBB3 things seem to stay the same.
When you started at Georgia Tech was creating forum software your only goal or did you have other projects in mind?
Mike:
I had a couple of projects that I was really excited about. The other front-runner besides Ninja Post was to create a better online TV guides.
Sites like TVguide.com always resort to a complicated and clunky grid. The sites load slowly, their UI is awful, and the search mechanisms leave much to be desired.
For my master’s project I built an online TV guide that is simple, fast, and elegant. With the increasing popularity and computing power of tablet computers (e.g., the iPad) it’s an idea I’d like to return too.
I hope to this idea once Ninja Post is more mature.
Glen: The iPod App market is a great market to be in. I know a few people online that report to make 6 figures alone from that market.
Ninja Post is much different from other forum software how do you feel that it has an edge over other forum software?
Mike:
We tried to make Ninja Post fun and easy to use. For starters, we recognized that one barrier to entry for many users is the registration process for new users. Joining a new forum is a pain.
That’s why we use OpenID and oAuth and Facebook Connect for Ninja Post forums. Of course, we don’t use complicated terms like “OpenID” — it just confuses people. Instead we say, “Sign up with your Google, Yahoo, Twitter or Facebook account.”
This is a new approach for many people and we meet some resistance occasionally. But once people try it they see how convenient it is and usually like it.
We also wanted to create forum software that is easy to set up and host. Forums, as I’m sure you know, can be resource hogs. That’s why we set up Ninja Post as a cloud-based solution.
From a UI point of view, Ninja Post is radically different from traditional forum software.
The cornerstone of the Ninja Post UI is the vertical navigation bar on the left side of the page. This is similar to what you might see in a web mail client like Gmail.
Glen: Yep, I definitely agree. I mod on a browser game’s board and it takes for ever to load due to the amount of forums.
It’s a very active forum all of the forums get used but the list of forums seem endless.
Being a relatively new software does NinjaPost allow customs plug-ins, custom modifications or custom themes?
Mike:
We’ve thought about creating an API or even making Ninja Post open source but interest from developers isn’t there. At least not yet. Someday we’d like to release an API for developers to create their own plug-ins.
With regards to custom themes: one of our goals with Ninja Post is create forums that are elegant and easy to brand. To this end, we have a design panel that enables the user to set the color of most elements on the page. We also support customized CSS pages.
Glen: I know I would definitely be interested in the API.
It’s one thing I encourage in new forum administrators is to make their forum unique. Content aswell as design and branding and I am really glad that NinjaPost supports this.
Any failures or minor set-backs you would like to tell us about when creating Ninja post?
Mike:
When we started building Ninja Post last summer, we began with the notion to create a forum that is fast and simple. Somewhere along the way “fast and simple” evolved into “fast and modern”.
“Modern” prompted feature creep. For example, we spent weeks integrating Ninja Post with Twitter so that each community has its own Twitter stream — sourced by members of the community. It’s a cool way to get a snap shot of what people from your community are talking about on Twitter.
This is an exciting and very cool idea but it might be a little ahead of its time. The user response up to this point has been lukewarm.
The advanced Twitter integration may catch on, but looking back we could have focused more on our core competency which lies in building fast and elegant forum software to help users make personal connections with one another.
Glen: Twitter is such a great way to build traffic to your forum and not a lot of forums are serious about twitter therefore are missing a great deal of potential traffic.
Don’t get me wrong, they have twitter icon’s but don’t spend a lot of time optimizing it. Personally, It’s good to see NinjaPost taken that step forward.
It may take a while for other people to catch on but once they do I don’t think they will be disappointed.
As a forum admin I think it’s important to keep my users in line within the forum rules…Does ninja post have some sort of warning/infraction system like vBulliten or something similar?
Mike:
Our approach with regards to spam and inappropriate approach is similar to Craig’s List: we’ve made it easy for users to flag and report Spam and inappropriate content. And we’ve made it easy for moderators/site admins to remove this content.
Site admins have the ability to contact users directly if they act out of turn and they can ban users and/or report their IP address to authorities if necessary.
Glen: Moderation sounds easy enough.
If I wanted to monetize NinjaPost how I would I go about doing so? Can you easily insert banner ads or Adsense code to make money from your forum?
Mike:
Yes, site admins can insert ads or any content they wish across the top of the page (e.g., a horizontal banner ad) or on the right hand side of the page (e.g., a vertical banner ad).
At this time, we work closely with site admins who want to insert this content in these spots. We are working on a self-serve solution but we’re taking a “wait and see approach” to understand how these areas will be used. We want to offer maximum flexibility without opening any security loop holes.
Glen: That’s great. There is nothing better than making a profit from your forum as long as you are not disturbing the community vibe.
SEO is a big factor of today’s websites in my opinion. What SEO features does NinjaPost have?
Mike:
Yes, SEO is crucial. Most notably, Ninja Post provides descriptive URLs. We’ve also taken “common sense” steps in our design such as intelligent use of <h1> tags.
The other big implication for SEO is that by dint of creating more UGC (user-generated content) a website’s footprint will expand. This creates a virtuous cycle: a bigger SEO footprint leads to more traffic from search engines which in turn leads to an even bigger SEO footprint.
I would like to thank Mike for letting me interview him. NinjaPost is the forum of future and I would advise you guys to go and check out this incredible forum software.
Visit the website – NinjaPost
NinjaPost on Twitter – @Ninjapost
