BuddyPress & Drupal – Future Social Network Platforms ?

I was going through Matt’s post today about BuddyPress, a WordPress MU-based platform which enabled the launch of social network ChickSpeak. Drupal is one of my another favourite open source CMS system which powers many community sites. I have been using Wordpress now for blogging and some of my earlier projects were on Drupal. And I am a fan of both for their unique offering and powerful feature sets.

What are social networks?
According to me a connected community is a social network. So, Slashdot is the oldest social network for me, blogging with a blog roll is a social network for me, digg is SNS, facebook in SNS , orkut is SNS and so on.

But most importantly according to the technical definition a social network should be a site (which can be about anything) which shows your your friends and friends of friends and forms a network.

Why strict social networks are difficult?
To show this path and calculate the relationship between users and show them the shortest path between any two users is the most difficult and intensive task. It can burn your processor and fry up your MySQL servers.

Blogging eco-system was a good candidate for social network
I was of the opinion that there would be some open standard, we all would have a blogroll, share it with each other through some common ‘platform’ and it would form a social network automagically, but that never happened. We could not share ‘friends’ and become ‘FOAF‘ of each other.

But Social Network is again about Content now as search is about Vertical now
Social networks after some time started showing up fatigue as users found out the economics of friending and ‘my network’ or ‘friends of friends’ was not something that would make you a permanent citizen of a SNS. WP&D based systems have the functionalities to enable ‘content’ and to enable ‘niche/vertical’.

Social is Personal again
Now again SNS is about my stuff, my friends, my photos, my choices,  my groups, my videos and all that personal stuff.

Wordpress & Drupal ; why it may work
- WP & D both are most popular content management system around the web. Have thousands of extensions and can be modified not just by a opensource developer but also by a relatively code-challenged person also.
- The developer community of both of these software are almost wanting to change the world. They are not limited by ideas and are constantly improving their codes and adding the new ones
- WP & D are the platform which are not just limited to common / personal use but also have a serious business and commercial use by some major media players.
- The sort of affinity groups that you can create around a custom or niche site is far superior compared to a generalistic social network.
- SNS of now may be SNS portals or gateways for future which would connect or be a distributors of SNS built on WP & D and such.
- There are thousands and millions of permutation and combinations possible on the look & functionality of these WP & D based solutions. Whereas, it will be disasterous for SNS to offer each of these.
- Users have a personality disorder, as more and more people realize that they cannot have a one SNS profile for all their personalities, they will hop on to micro SNS sites rather than a big SNS sites where the boss and the wife both can watch them.
- Problem of plenty, if you have millions and billions of topic – is it possible for a single SNS to cover, No?
- SNS are just new Chat, IM and Email, a place where they converge.
- How many social networks are possible  ? – Go to Dmoz, pick each of the categories and subcategories and multiply them, multiply with number of locations (city, street, buildings…) and now multiply it with number of people on this planet. In short, infinite social networks are possible.
- WP&D offer the plaform for creating this infinite possibilities, may be in future we all will have a mandatory blogs and our friendship will be shown in cross-posting.
- I am not sure of WP, but Drupal sites are interoperable with each other in terms of logins and APIs. If all the WP&D sites start talking to each other and would allow connections through APIs or through Semantics – then they are social network automagically. So Technorati, you already are a SNS of blogs and may be the candidate of becoming a facebook or myspace, when connected WP&D ecosystem is not a dream but a reality
- If future is to be believed Semantics is the key of the web 3.0, so what will happen to search engines and SNS. They will stay ofcourse but the dependency would be less. The WP&D based system will cross-refer and links each other in much more intelligent way. So for a niche segment you may enter any site and just keep on browsing and discovering instead of going to ‘oracle’ on the Internet and asking her every time the difference between the blue pill and the red pill. You will enter into the WP&D matrix and the matrix will guide you on it’s own.

Related posts:

1. Social Networks, Uninhibited Life Broadcasting, Circle of Trust & Network Cleanliness
2. The network theories, the actual size of your social network & the circle of intimacy
3. Customer Service Trend : Volunteer, Social & People Powered
4. Why Indian Non-Profits / Businesses are not using Social Media
5. Accenture Interactive and The Future of Digital Marketing

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