CaribbeanUnited.com

The original online community

CaribbeanUnited.com was running before the storefront was. By October 2000 it already had message boards, a live chat that ran every Tuesday and Thursday at nine o'clock at night, Caribbean personals, free Caribbean email addresses and a newsletter — under the line "Your Home away from home".

By 2006 it was a full discussion forum with a photo gallery and a members list, carrying its own standing line: Bringing the Caribbean Together.

What people actually did there

There was a board for general Caribbean conversation, and a board for Caribbean history and geography that ran as a chain — answer the question correctly, then post the next one. Leslie moderated both directly.

Founder records from the original Caribbean United community indicate that it grew to more than 2,000 members, and that what happened on the boards spilled into gatherings, outings, cruises and cultural events offline. Those event records are among the things we are still trying to recover, so we are describing them as founder history rather than as documented fact.

What it taught us

Three things, and they still hold.

People came for the island and stayed for the region — someone would arrive looking for their own country and end up talking to everyone. The most valuable thing on the site was never the content, it was the relationships. And in January 2009 there is a thread on the board about moving the community to Facebook, which is exactly what happened to almost every independent community of that era: the conversation moved, and the home that held it went quiet.

One Caribbean United is being built knowing that.