Two years plus is a long time in Internet Time. When Yuku was launched as being “available now” in September 2005, its unique selling point appeared to be the way ezboard, Inc. were promising to share advertising revenues with message board owners.

In the presentation, ezboard, Inc. CEO “Silent Rob” Labatt is seen showing off the message board functions and user profiles that had been in development since early 2005.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve since wasted all of 2005, 2006 and now most of 2007.

The idea to combine message boards, user profiles, blogs and media hosting in one place was a good one even if not entirely original - most things on Yuku from ezboard, Inc. are ideas that someone else has had previously - as for instance WordPress can be extended with plug-ins and third party software to incorporate discussion forums, photo albums, etc. with the added benefit of an option to self-host the whole shebang and include advertising to generate a revenue stream as I do here.

In June 2005, Yuku was being touted by Labatt as the next generation of ezboard (although the name ‘Yuku’ had not been unveiled at that stage). Inexpicably, they concentrated not on ezboard migrations or getting the message boards ready for users. No, instead ezboard concentrated on the user profiles no doubt spurred on by the growth of MySpace and indeed Facebook. But by doing so, they dropped the ball and simply became Yet Another MySpace Wannabe even down to the evident similarities in their Terms of Use. Of course, extended beta tests are nothing new, c.f. Google’s applications and services, but then they are not usually quite this long for such products.

So under the direction of Robert Labatt (and presumably with the backing of the venture capitalists led by his wife’s firm), the development of Yuku has gone on and on and it’s still in beta.

In the meantime, however, everyone else has moved on. vBulletin is a very accomplished message board application and one I use myself for three different discussion boards and its far better in my opinion than Yuku is. And of course there’s now vBulletin Blog to go with the board software. I’ve already mentioned WordPress and its plug-ins capability.

And now another major player has revealed online communities, blogs and social media in one place.

“Every member of your community can create a personalized profile page. Standard Profile pages include the following content:

“Personal profile information, such as a photo, interests, or location information
A list of comments submitted by that user and comment responses
A list of recommended posts, forums, and comments by that user
Forums, community blogs and a number of templates and skins.”

All sound familiar?

Well this is Movable Type Community Solution from Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type and LiveJournal. But for once they’ve copied Yuku and not revealed pricing (you have to get a custom quote)!

So as time drags on and “Silent Rob” Labatt continues being elusive, maybe going for glider flights in Hawaii or going karting with the (small number of) staff, Yuku falls further and further behind the competition whilst not charging its users for the bandwidth and (reducing…) image storage.