I came across this very cool new site that's currently in Alpha status.
Tagsurf is a very interesting new form of message board, that takes the latest and greatest concept for classifying and structuring info on the web: tags, (so called folksonomies, that put the power of classification directly into the hands of the users creating the content) and applies them to the actual message posts.

The most popular sites that use this form of classification are del.icio.us and Flickr, and it was easier to use Tagsurf when I thought of it as basically Flickr with messages replacing the photos, or del.icio.us, with messages replacing the bookmarks.

Hitting the front page for the first time presents you with a sprawl of random snippets of conversations; each usually having absolutely nothing to do with the one before it. The first time I loaded the page I thought it was impenetrable, just a long list of random text with no context, then I realized the page is very like the del.icio.us homepage - the same super-sparse type of layout but with the latest conversations replacing the links.

With that realization it was easier to explore and appreciate Tagsurf - clicking through to the tags at the ends of the conversations reveals more posts on that topic - for example clicking the tag for Google gives you a reverse chronological list of the latest things people have been saying about it
Items posted to Tagsurf are not limited to messages either - Web URL's can also be posted, allowing conversations to spring up around them, for instance check the comments users have posted about Russell Beattie's intro to Tagsurf.

RSS feeds are ubiquitous throughout the whole site, allowing you to be notified in your aggregator of replies to threads, but more than that, you can Watch topics and get notified through email or IM. Each message posted also has it's own unique permalink and a Thread link displays the complete conversation (though it would be more intuitive if the number of replies was displayed alongside these links)

You can install a bookmarklet to check for Tagsurf conversations on any page on the internet; this will be very useful, another way to check for opinions alongside the Bloglines citations button, and Technorati's cosmos.

The usefulness of the bookmarklet and the site in general depends on one obvious thing though, whether enough people regularly use tagsurf to make it another del.icio.us - del.icio.us took off because there couldn't be anything easier to understand and use; my own first impression of Tagsurf is that it's harder to get used to than that, it requires more effort from the users, and being a previous user of del.icio.us or flickr is an advantage.

There are bugs evident as I use it - the notifiers don't work for me at all currently - and I think a Popular conversations page like del.icio.us and an overall-tags page like Technorati's would be good additions (at the moment you can't easily view the full range of tags people have posted in, there's only a recently-posted-tags box along the side) but these are all forgivable given its Alpha status, and the fact that it's impressive even as it is.

More info:
· User conversations about Tagsurf
· Russell Beattie: Tagsurf: Tagged Hyperforum
· Tagsurf first review - This is going to be big
· Tagsurf: a clever use of the tagging concept