I was just reading an interview of MyBlackBerry Community Manager Becky Young that Doug published and decided to check out how RIM’s social networking site is doing. It has been a little over 4 weeks since MyBlackBerry launched and things seem to be picking up on the site. The site seems to really draw in new and first time BlackBerry users who are having issues with their devices. In the interview Becky explains some of RIM’s thought process behind MyBlackBerry and some of their plans for the future. I am glad to see that they plan on extending MyBlackBerry beyond North America. I just hope that they will not create a whole new community for each country since the tips in America are the same as the UK. Maybe they could have a forum for each country like they do for carriers…
There were a few other things that really struck out to me like the right side listing of the top 5 popular threads on MyBlackBerry:
- New Blackberry Messenger 5.0
- Introduce yourself
- can’t read fb messages
- Post Your BBM 5.0 Barcode
- Photos of your BlackBerry Collection
It is really cool to see that RIM is not going “Mod Happy” on the forums and really trying to help users. I have seen Becky and quite a few other RIM employees actively participating in the threads. I am not sure what the deal is with all the usernames with underscores and numbers like j__428 and j__802 and lots of others but they seem to be posting valid questions. The other thing I noticed was that www.myblackberry.com still forwards to the BIS login page and not to the MyBlackBerry website. Never really understood that…
All in all it looks like Becky Young has a dedicated staff that has marching orders from RIM to make MyBlackBerry work. Things look like they are moving forward with RIM clearly listening to what users want. I put my vote in for a mobile version of the site… 
So what do you think? Have you found yourself browsing and contributing at MyBlackBerry?
Nikolaus Walch ( View Profile) Enthusiast - Posts: 601
Posted: September 17, 2009 at 10:45 AM EST
It hasn’t reached proper mass to be useful. If you’re using it then feel free to send me a friend’s request on it. Want to see what it’s like with more people around
Nikolaus Walch ( View Profile) Enthusiast - Posts: 601
Posted: September 17, 2009 at 11:01 AM EST
They seem to be trying to be a combination of Facebook and Crackberry Forum, and either comes across very well implemented. Not sure what they are trying to be. I think what would work better is an online implementation of all one’s BBM contacts. If I link to someone on BBM, that it would create the same linkage on MyBlackBerry.com, so to only expand those connections and allow for cooler interactions online.