I just noticed nabble.com and on the first look they seem like a great service for hosted forums.

Personally, I find this a very useful service. For example, a small company (software or otherwise) might use that for hosting forums for their products. An open-source project might use that for hosting forums for users of the software and for developers.

I find that option much more attractive than hosting your own forum software. Even though I have my own server that I can abuse and technical knowledge to do the abuse, I'm not interested in spending time installing/managing/upgrading the software and making sure that it's secure. Administration overhead is a real problem.

Another problem is that most of forum software are phpBB-look-a-likes (phpBB probably wasn't the one to invent the look, it's just an example) and the look is ugly. I couldn't find a decent looking, open-source forum software. The one I like isn't publicly available.

There are existing solutions, of course. Yahoo! Groups has been there forever and I actually used it once in the past to create a forum. I hate the way they look (even after their re-design) and behave. I follow an Io forum on Yahoo! Groups and it's just painful.

Then there's Google Groups, which works better than Yahoo! Groups but their RSS feeds are broken (no full-text, don't work in bloglines) which is important to me.

To be fair, Nabble doesn't have RSS at all, but I'm hoping they'll implement it.

In addition to hosting your own forums, Nabble also works as a mailing list mirror.

I don't like flooding my mailbox with mailing-list traffic and I don't like the fact that you have to subscribe to post. Nabble solves both problems: you can read the list via web-interface (RSS feed would be much better) and you can post directly from Nabble.

Compare the Nabble version of any mailing-list hosted on SourceForge - the contrast is striking (I hate how SourceForge handles mailing lists of their project).

My only concern is their viability. They're self-funded startup and they admit that they have no idea how will they make money, just yet.

It's great that you can get a free, useful service, but it's not going to be great if the service will vanish because Nabble can't pay the bandwidth bills.

Here's me hoping they'll find a way to get revenues and that they'll add RSS feeds.