Excite Redefines Community on the Web With Excite Communities
PR Newswire - August 17, 1998 08:15
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Puts Power in the Users Hands to Build Comprehensive Communities Areas Online
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Excite, Inc. (Nasdaq: XCIT) today announced Excite Communities, a new free service that gives consumers the power to create customized Internet communities quickly and easily, with unprecedented levels of control over the environments they create. The Excite Communities beta program launched today for early adopters who want to build personal communities on the People & Chat channel at www.excite.com. The full service will launch with populated communities for viewing and joining later this fall.
Define and control the space you build together
Excite Communities integrates a combination of online community and publishing tools never before offered together such as photo albums, group calendars, and group address books. The first service of its kind on the Web, the service lets members determine the focus of their community and decide whether the content can be viewed by the public or just the members of the community. Community members can develop a collective history by having permanent conversations attached to anything within the community, whether it is a calendar listing, photo, address or announcement. Users can easily and quickly create a community with the provided templates. This combination of content with conversation lets groups share their thoughts, memories, knowledge and future planning in a very new way.
"Communities used to be about where we live," said Joe Kraus, senior vice president and co-founder, Excite, Inc. "Now community is about people communicating in many different ways. For many, Excite communities is a place to extend the relationships that are already happening in the real-world -- families and friends for example. Excite Communities also lets people an online center for clubs, organizations and people with similar interests to share what, when, and how they want, with whomever they want.
Control the access that you give to others
Because Excite Communities is built to give creators the privacy and flexibility that they have in the real world, communities can be private and invisible to the outside world or completely open to the public. When a community is initially created, the creator must choose whether to list the community in the public Excite Community Directory. Similar to a phone book listing, a community listed in the directory can be used by the public and individuals can ask to join. Similar to an unlisted phone number, an unlisted community can be used only by existing members and membership is not open to the public unless invited to join.
Tools for building Excite Communities include:
* Community welcome page -- Every time a user enters a community as a member, s/he is greeted with a welcome page that gives an update on what's going on in the community.
* Announcements -- Community area where individuals can post notices to the group.
* Calendar -- Each community hosts a common group calendar that lets members of the community publish events and happenings.
* Photos -- Each community has a group photo area where people can create photo albums. Everyone can contribute. Around each photo, members of the community can post comments about the photo.
* Contact List -- A group address book for each community lets its members store names and addresses online and look up names within the community.
* Members -- A posting area where members can browse the member list and view profiles of any individual member and learn about others in their community.
* Discussions -- Every community has a discussion area, where members of the community can have posted, running discussions. These discussions are permanent, and a member of a community who visits can read all past discussions.
* Chat -- Every community will have its own private chat area for members to discuss topics of interest. These chats are live and are not maintained permanently.
* What's New for You -- To really stay in touch with your community and what is new in it, Excite Communities will recognize every time an individual enters the community and will highlight all areas that have new content since the last time that individual visited.
* My Messages -- A personal message board where private messages can be sent to other members of the community.
* Bookmarks -- Place where the group can publish and share their favorite Web sites and URL's.
"When people refer to community today, they typically think of chat, bulletin boards and public home pages," continued Kraus. "But no one has really completely integrated today's online communication tools with publishing online. Excite recognized an untapped opportunity on the Web to help groups of users with a common interest (a family, a Cub Scout pack, beanie baby collectors), who have no technical skills, create a unique place to share on the Web."
Common uses of Excite Communities might include:
* Families -- Create a private family environment to stay in close contact with your brother in London, your parents in Idaho, your sister in her dorm room in Los Angeles and your granny in Germany.
* Clubs -- Get the word out on your newly formed rock climbing club.
* Reunions -- Create a place to plan upcoming reunions, post notes to old friends, and show pictures of your new kids. Save money on phone bills and stamps that you usually spend.
* Friends -- Stay in touch with college buddies after graduation. Use it to plan the next ski vacation, post photos from the last one and gossip about who will show up with whom.
* Work groups -- Maintain a confidential group planning schedule and conversation about global team projects.
* Special interests -- You're interested in Yoga, but no one else is in Augusta, GA. So you create a public community to discuss and publish new yoga techniques. Yoga fans around the world join and suddenly you have an online learning center as well as a ton of new friends with common interests.
About Excite, Inc.
Founded in 1994, Excite, Inc. is a global media company offering consumers a personalized Web start page on www.excite.com and a 'back to basics' Web search service on www.webcrawler.com, and advertisers the best one-to-one marketing services available online. The Excite Network consists of two of the largest brands on the Web, Excite (www.excite.com) and WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com), and its subsidiaries; Classifieds2000, MatchLogic, Inc., Excite Japan Co., Ltd. and Excite UK, Ltd. Localized versions of Excite are available in France, Germany, the UK, The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan and Australia. Based in Redwood City, Calif., Excite, Inc. has strategic relationships with America Online, Inc., Apple Computer, Inc., CUC Investments Inc., Intuit Inc., Netscape Communications Corp., Prodigy Internet and Tribune Company.
SOURCE Excite, Inc.
/CONTACT: Melissa Walia, 650-569-2213, or melissa@excite.com, or Kristi
Dyer, 650-569-2031, or kdyer@excite.com, both of Excite, Inc./
/Web site: excite.com
(XCIT) |
