If you look at this from a competitive standpoint, you limit the impact of other forums (if that's what you want to do) by offering a superior experience to the target group (which at this point seems unclear "developers" "end users" etc).

It's not necessarily the device vendors, operators, and private businesses that decide how many forums are out there. It's the users of the forums that decide, the community members that give their vote of confidence to the various forums. With a massive amount of members the forum gains critical mass and it ends up being the natural place to start, because you know that's where the action is.

I believe that by being FIRST meego.com has a unique first-mover advantage over ANY other meego-related forum. Furthermore meego.com has a potential advantage over any other forum in that Nokia and Intel are both involved in the site.

If I were an executive at either of these companies, and certainly if I were a sales and marketing executive, I would get involved in meego.com and I would make sure I get the end users' attention, interest, approval, engagement, loyalty, buzz, and involvement in the forum, because ultimately it would lead to business. I would realize that I had a unique, but temporary, advantage here to create THE premier on-line meego community.

I came to this forum from WinMo and mainly the on-line forum called XDA-developers (hasn't been mentioned here; at least it didn't show up in my search). Yes I've frequented other forums, blogs, review sites etc, but I always came back to XDA, simply because it was the largest community that attracted the biggest amount of members, generated the greatest threads and had the sharpest developers.

For those of you unfamiliar with that community, it's got close to 2.2 million registered users, up by roughly 200.000 since december 2009 (!). There are 5-6 thousand people on line at any one point in time.

That site started out as an HTC/Windows Mobile developer driven community but evolved into a mix of user and developer forum. With the launch of HTC Android devices XDA opened up to this OS as well. A few weeks ago, due to popular demand, it opened up to other brand manufactured devices, besides HTC.

I think it would be a mistake by Nokia/Intel to make Meego.com a developer centric community exclusively and forego the opportunity and power residing in the end users.

Surely the issues of how to structure the forum, the number of sub forums, forums for other classes of meego devices and other brand manufacturers can be resolved.

Here's a link to XDA developers newly designed entrance. Nice color choice btw: www.xda-developers.com

and to the forum:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/