My friends at Pidgin / BoardTracker have recently launched Klostu – a site that unifies bulletin boards from around the world through a central access site and unified login system. Klostu allows you to find thousands of bulletin boards in one place: you can make friends via their social network functionality or browse / search through millions of forum topics.
Klostu was recently demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where it generated a lot of buzz, and not surprisingly as there are very few companies operating in this space, despite the potential benefits that connecting bulletin boards offer (see my previous post on a “Technorati for bulletin boards“).
I’ve been demoing Klostu this week, and so far it’s great. Here are screenshots of the main page and my own personalised profile page. The drag and drop features for moving around blocks and customisable tab groupings for blocks are a nice touch. You simply have to double click on any block to edit the properties / features of that section. You can add as many RSS feeds as desired, comment blocks, shared files, etc., and there are many more customisable blocks on the way…
I could say more but it’s best if you try it out for yourself, just signup at klostu.com (Edit: You’ll need to request a beta test key on the signup page). Ron and the team at Klostu will be releasing modules for various bulletin boards shortly, allowing board owners to integrate the Klostu single signon system into their own sites (demo here).
