lebisol - 09 May 2008 10:28 AM

I am wih Benoît on this one...if users are invloved into non-profit or “social” site chances they want more interaction and more features to feel like they are part of it.

Thanks for the support but, just to clarify, Open Social per se is not related to non-profit sites. It’s an open API to enable social networking features accross a large range of sites.
In fact I see many benefits in offering social networking features on commercial sites because it drives traffic to the site: “oh my friend has posted on the wiki, I want to read that article.”

I think one of the best implementation is Flickr. You can follow other photographers (and rank them as friends or familly as well) and when you log into the site, you see the photos by those photographers you’ve been following. It’s really cool and I find myself logging on Flickr everyday just to check the contributions by other photographers.

I envision the same thing for wiki posts, comments, etc. as great additions to EE already strong support for user-generated content and user feedback.

--ben

TimesPeople is another example of the social networking feature that I’d like to see added to EE. The goal is obviously to drive traffic to the site by having the users generate content for their friends.

We’ve been building some social areas into Gear Live. For example, our profile pages are looking nice, and we should have friends available shortly. Of course, this is all through third-party stuff.

BTW - my understanding of the EE terms is that you cant start a hosted blogging service. That means you cant use EE to start a Blogspot or Wordpress.com competitor. However, that doesn’t stop you from letting your members submit content to YOUR site. They just cant sign up and create their OWN sites on a mass scale.