Most of our readers, must be aware of bbPress. For those who don’t know about bbPress, let me enlighten you. It’s a light-weight forum software that is available for free and is from the makers of “WordPress “. It competes with phpBB, Vanilla, SMF and other open-source forum softwares. I prefer bbPress over others as this forum software is by Automattic team and syncs well with WordPress.
Team Automattic has softly released TalkPress, that is going to be the online service version of bbPress. TalkPress will be same for bbPress, what WordPress.com is for WordPress.org. TalkPress is currently available for only few selected VIP members and is currently powering Health.com’s forums.
Matt has clarified it himself that they’ve used the domain TalkPress instead of bbPress.com for couple of reasons -
1. Domain name is not available – bbPress.com wasn’t available.
2. To avoid confusion – I know that how difficult it becomes for me to explain the difference between WordPress.com & WordPress.org to those who don’t have much idea about the service and software. For most people, WordPress = WordPress.com and now it’ll be way to easier for us to explain the difference between TalkPress and bbPress.
I’m pretty much excited to see TalkPress taking a wonderful shape and I’m sure that I’ll be much more interested in using this as a service rather than hosting it myself. Active forums can become a huge resource hog and thus can increase your hosting dollars (here are some of the WordPress optimization tips through which you can save your hosting dollars). I just hope that it becomes available as soon as possible.
I just hope that TalkPress will not be capped like WordPress.com or should have a complete paid package. This way, not only they’ll get to generate lot of revenue but it will also make bbPress and TalkPress popular too.
What are your thoughts on TalkPress? What do you think about the pricing strategy of Automattic when it comes to offering services?
I think TalkPress needs to be very very good if it is a paid software. Remember the best out there is V Bulletin and it has awesome features. Though it is paid its worth the dough.
Yeah, even I think that vBulletin is around and it has one of the best features. Invision Power board is really impressive too. Still, I think TalkPress will do good as many bloggers who are fans of wordpress will prefer to use it with it. Pricing is also something that'll decide the fate of TalkPress.