Losing the momentum.... Losing the plot?.... vBSEO please refocus on what is important

Far be it for me to knock vBSEO as a product - I've been an avid supporter since the product was very young. The product itself is fine but it's the development... the momentum.... the FOCUS.... the regular release schedule.... the ENTHUSIASM of the customers and I imagine the team that is going down hill.

I am fairly sure I am not the only one to notice a slight change of attitudes and priorities around here.... What with the team's attendance to San Fran and tweetboard I cant help but put two and two together.

It's glaringly obvious that many delays are caused by the efforts being thrown at tweetboard - I've read the vbseo and tweetboard twitter and team member twitter accounts, I read the TB website, the posts here at vBSEO and I'm sad to report that on the outside looking in I think you guys have lost the plot.

You are neglecting your flag ship product.

There are a ton of things vBSEO needs to get sorted for vBulletin 4. Many things vBSEO nails in the vB 3 series, but sadly falls down in support for the 4 series.

I am pleading with the team to restock and take focus of whats important here. I would argue the importance here should be placed on vBSEO and pleasing it's customers, rather than your current distraction Tweetboard - incidentally, I cant for the life of me see how this makes money.

I hope I am wrong but I can only go from what I am reading on the various vbseo network of sites and accounts in the twitterverse.

Please guys..... you rock!! You have to deal with boredom in other ways

Sorry to bump, but I wanted to say I have nothing against tweetboard and plan to use it personally on my site and one of my employers... the emphasis in the above is merely surrounding priority.

I am still referring clients to buy vBSEO so hope this post isn't taken as vBSEO whacking for whacking's sake.

Composing response. Will update shortly.

I have a feeling this is gonna be one of those mega posts

Thank-you for expressing your concerns Rob. As one of our longest time contributors, your feedback is very important to us.

I'll be the first to admit that the 3.5 Gold delay was due in part to our visit to San Francisco, as I mention over in this thread. I would argue that we are focusing on vBSEO and its customers just as we did before Tweetboard. The heart of our business is #1 the quality of our product and #2 our customer support level, and I hope those two elements are well reflected in the latest embodiment of our product, 3.5 Gold. That's why I'm most interested in this piece:

There are a ton of things vBSEO needs to get sorted for vBulletin 4. Many things vBSEO nails in the vB 3 series, but sadly falls down in support for the 4 series.

Atm vBSEO 3.5 has not officially been tagged "Gold" yet. I'm opening a channel of communication via this thread, so that you (and others) can bring to our attention any SEO related values that 3.5 brings on-board the vBulletin 3 series, that are missing in the vB 4 series, OR anything you deem "a must-have", that vBSEO is not addressing at the moment. We will be monitoring this thread closely for items that we may have missed.

Back to Tweetboard in the context of vBSEO. I see it as a complementary product that will add value to our users' sites, in a very similar fashion as vBSEO does. Right now TB is expanding to become a destination site that users will be able to mask to their *own* domain. Since TB reformats tweets into rich, threaded conversations, and allows visitors to create *parent threads*, it capitalizes on the magic of User Generated Content (UCG) via user engagement. Mix that with a SEO, on your own domain, and you have a big value that stays within your web real estate (i.e. http://twitter.yoursite.com). Once the product reaches a determined usage level, monetizing will come via means of premium features, business targeted features, or a shared revenue advertising model.

Furthermore I see the Tweetboard experience as one that has allowed us to dive deeper into the Social Networking arena, enabling us to discover how to best use it towards a website's bottom-line. We have already extracted a number of ideas on how to make the Social Networking principles work for a forum like vB in very meaningful ways, and not just the usual "Connect with Facebook" or "Sign up with Twitter" button. That is value vBSEO users will be getting in the near future as well.

All in all, I see a big win for vBSEO customers in us engaging in the Tweetboard venture. Of course, it shall become more evident when actual features that capitalize on SN's make it to vBSEO, or a Crawlability product.

[edit]sorry, forgot to add 'phew!' - might you consider bringing back the pre-release team, or a small, focused 'beta' group?[/edit]

Can you properly define masked Juan? I'm confused by the word when used in conjunction with 'Mix that with a SEO, on your own domain'.

For clarity, will the content be served in the traditional way from our sub domain and hence be spiderable at our domain, or will it only be spiderable on a tweetboard subdomain that we mask over with our own url.

I just want to be clear, that's all. Either way is fine with me as tweetboard is something that will be used regardless but just so Im clear.