Cloud

You Know Someone on boards.ie

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John Breslin

February 11, 2005

I had an interesting thought about boards.ie’s members. There’s > 32,000 accounts. That’s nearly 1% of the population.

More realistically, let’s say that half of those 32k are real people based in Ireland. I’d say that each person has a typical social network of a couple of hundred people (friends, business associates, classmates), so it’s safe to say that if you’re Irish, you know at least one person who is a member of boards.ie. Doesn’t matter who or where you are, one of your friends is probably on boards.ie.

As you know, I’ve been working on the social networking add-on for vBulletin (vBFriends); once I start adding in things like shortest paths, then we’ll start having fun 😀

[17:30] <ecksor> Our demographic information isn’t at all precise, but I recall being in a well known computer hardware shop last year and overhearing one of the sales people advise a customer to try the For Sale section on boards as a good place to look for an item they were looking for. I was quite chuffed at that.

[17:50] <seamus> Funny that, I was in a very well know PC store last year buying RAM. I casually mentioned to the checkout guy that SDRAM seemed very expensive now, and that I could do well selling off the Half Gig I had spare at home, to which he replied, “Yeah, you could try the For Sale board on boards.ie. You’ll sell anything there.”.

7 responses to “You Know Someone on boards.ie”

Tom Raftery

February 12, 2005

32,000 is a very impressive figure John and many congrats are due to Tom and yourself for this.

One question though – how many of these are regular posters? Are the accounts cleaned out from time to time (ok 2 questions!)? I only ask because I know that in my case, I have created at least 3 or 4 accounts on Boards.ie as email addresses changed or when I forgot the details of a previous one (through lack of use). I’m hardly the only one in this situation.
Cloud

February 14, 2005

Well, that’s a good question. We recently estimated that 5,000 people posted in a short period of time (less than one month), so I guess that half of the 32k member population being real people in Ireland is a fairly conservative estimate. There are people who have created 3 or 4 accounts, but I would think that they would be the minority, not the norm. Of course, short of a sending out a questionnaire that’s not going to be entirely certain…

I used SQL to get some idea of recent usage:

mysql> select count(*) from user where lastactivity > 1105645750; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 7306 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.28 sec)

That date number (110564575) is 13 January 2005.

Now let’s try one year:

mysql> select count(*) from user where lastactivity > 1076711826; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 19169 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.29 sec)

A lot better than I thought 🙂
Mark Waters

February 15, 2005

What can be a little disconcerting is that you may not connect the on-line identity to the off-line identity. For instance, on the Region-West board there are four people claiming to be from the same small village as myself. I haven’t a clue who any of them are.

I can imagine a situation where two people could have two mutually exclusive relationships with each other that could be vastly different. I wonder which one would be more authentic?

Coincidentally I have met you before off-line :).
Tom Raftery

February 15, 2005

19,169?

I’m impressed John. That’s better than I would have guessed, I have to admit.

Kudos to yourself and Tom for managing this feat.

Tom
Cloud

February 15, 2005

Thanks Tom – it’s really all thanks to the hard work of our team – the administrators (Jerry, Dan, Ger, Tom and I) and the moderators.

Mark; the thought of these parallel relationships is a bit scary. Good to hear from you 😀
eernie Goldbach

February 16, 2005

I wonder if you would collaborate with your dev work so the social tool you devise can be mapped onto the Irish blogosphere.
Damien

February 20, 2005

With 32,000 identities you could do all kinds of stats with crossreferences. Boards.ie still hasn’t peaked but I’d say it will very soon if it’s rate of growth is anything to go by.

In my msn contact list now I have a section for boards.ie people I know. There’s 40 in that. Of the other 110 on the msn list I’d say about 30 more use boards too. The past 4 people I’ve dated have used boards, whether because I got them to sign up or they found it by themselves.