Online social networking combines the best aspects of email, bulletin boards, instant messaging and chat rooms. The largest online communities have populations that number in the millions. The biggest complaint is that online communities isolate the users from the "real world".
However, consider some advantages. Suppose you travel to a wonderful place and meet people you‘d like to keep in touch with. An online community is just the ticket. In fact, better than email, online communities allow and encourage interaction. The conversations persist and can be shared. Privacy is usually specified so the content can pe private, public, between friends, etc.
Another advantage is practical. Business communities are a terrific way to manage work searches.
And, in areas like geneology and membership with former organizations, online communities can reunite people who otherwise would have a hard time finding eachother efficiently.
Web2.0 is all about sharing information dynamically. Social networks, as a subset of Web2.0, are gaining momentum and efficiency.
(That's Dave Johnson of SocialSite on the right & Michael Hauser of www.betterbadnews.com)
Now, for some specifics. Dave Johnson, one of the founders of JRoller, this splendid community many of us enjoy free of charge, has been working on a new social networking tool called SocialSite. It's open source, utilizes the OpenSocial standard, a common API for social applications across multiple websites, and you can use it with Java, PHP or Ruby. I learned about Social Site by accident at JavaOne 2008. If you follow the link, you'll see some pictures I took there. Discovery is one of the greatest benefits of attending conferences.
I recently decided to try social networking in two settings. I wanted to create an online community for developers in user groups. And, I wanted to make a community that focused on healthy living. My efforts in community building have been very successful, but the online aspects were fragmented. They included websites, groups, and mailing lists. Of course, I wanted to use Java. So, when I found out the Dave was developing SocialSite and that SocialSite would enable extending an existing website to have community features, it was my first choice. But, since it was still under development, I looked further and found Marc Andreessen's Ning. Ning is written in Java and PHP. I put together Zoobird, a "dangerously organic" community, using Ning. After some experimentation, I also built Codetown for the development community.
I‘ve learned a lot in the couple of months that Zoobird and Codetown have been alive. The users are thrilled. The underlying architecture of social networking is revealing itself through the main features: profiles, privacy, discussions with categories that can live in groups or solo, and the ability for users to interact by making friends. These are just a few. Geolocation is absent, but I hope to see it in the future. I recently gave a talk on building social networks at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2008 (OSCON08) and found the audience very curious about what I had learned.
In the coming months, I‘ll share more of what I‘ve learned. Please share your experiences here as comments, too! A lot of this information is not well known.
I invite all of you to join Codetown and Zoobird,and explore the features and delightful community.
Stay tuned!
