Sazbean

Yesterday I took a look at Prospero, which is really more of a community vendor with social networking thrown in as an add-on. They run the community engines for some fairly large sites: Marthastewart.com, Business Week, iVillage, Monster (full client list). They have been in the business on the Internet since 1992, first as an ISP, then moving to developing interactive applications, which is where communities fit in.

Prospero is excellent at seamless integration, allowing community and website content to intermingle on any website. They focus mostly on community with boards, chats, reviews, article comments, and polls. Social networking is an add-on, which allows “advanced profiles”, but does not provide a true tool for finding and connecting with peers. If you want a hands-off approach, Prospero will build and integrate whatever components you want with even seeding and moderation services available.

Their pricing is based on the modules you use with additional monthly charges for operations and usage. For the basic engine, messaging and social networking, I was given list price ballparks of $9k/month for licensing, $2k/month for operations, and $500/month for approximately 500,000 monthly page requests for a grand total of $11,500/month. With volume discounts, the price would probably be closer to $7800/month. There is also an initial cost for professional services to design, build and integrate your community (they said these costs are almost always lower than $30k and often closer to $10k) with a 4-8 week startup time.

These costs clearly put Prospero out of the range of small and medium B2B businesses and just about anyone else who does not have a clear understanding of the ROI and revenue streams. They also use ASP and .NET coding on their side, which just rubs me the wrong way (I have seen very few web applications done well in these “languages”).

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