[geeklog-devel] That "social" thing

[Dirk Haun]

So we have this vague idea for a GSoC project: "Add Social Networking  
Features"[1]. And because it is so vague, we didn't get any good  
student applications for it. After all, if we don't know what it  
should do, how are students supposed to come up with a decent  
application for it?

I was thinking that maybe before adding friends and stuff, we should  
be starting with something more basic (and useful). Like giving users  
more control over their profile page. Here are some ideas:

Some services (e.g. mixxt, SlideShare) have a feature called a "wall"  
where users can leave messages on other user's profile pages. Instead  
of reinventing the wheel, how about allowing comments on a user's  
profile?

Badges. Many services are offering badges that you can embed into your  
homepage. I'd like to have a Dopplr badge on my profile, for example.  
Others may prefer a Flickr badge to show off their latest photos, and  
so on.

In a similar vein: RSS feeds. Why not allow embedding your favorite  
RSS feed on your profile?

Overall, we should give users more control over what is displayed on  
their profile page. Let them hide the PGP key and the latest stories  
but let them allow comments on profiles, etc.

Once the profile feels more like a user's "home page", we can think  
about adding friends and such.

There are probably other things we can come up with. Is anybody  
interested to take on coordinating such an effort? There seems to be  
some interest in these sort of things. Also, at least some of these  
features are probably better implemented as plugins, which may require  
new / updated / fixed plugin API functions (there was a related forum  
discussion recently).

bye, Dirk

[1] http://wiki.geeklog.net/index.php/SoC_socialnetworking

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