Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.
This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.
Why blogs and not Facebook or MySpace
In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it’s not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, “For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.”
Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking — along the lines of what Messina envisions.
WordPress, why and how
WordPress is ideal for experimenting with a distributed social network. It has a plug-in architecture that makes it easy to extend. And people who use it are already comfortable to some extent with coming publicly online as individuals. Though there are, of course, WordPress installations that don’t represent just one person, in many cases they do.
Messina, along with Steve Ivy and Will Norris, is exploring how WordPress can serve as a social networking profile. To that end, a blog needs a way to identify itself to other blogs and share its contact lists, ideally in a privacy-protected manner. The OpenID identity standard can serve as a distributed identifier for both a person’s blog and the blogs of people to which that person is related. Messina and his partners plan to develop a WordPress plugin that exposes the contact list. An OpenID plugin for WordPress already exists; it was developed by Will Norris.
Not everyone wants unified social networking
WordPress-as-social-network, like the unified social graph meme, will most likely appeal to those who want to create one strong identity online. But not everyone does. Blogger danah boyd has written about how some people use social network identities in an ephemeral manner. Those who prefer a more multilayered and multifaceted depiction of themselves online might prefer to create multiple social networking profiles on different sites, representing themselves in different ways as the situation demands.
But those who already use WordPress probably want to build a strong and persistent online presence and identity. Plus they’re the geeky sort, with whom with the idea of a unified, distributed social network might resonate. And at least some of them are refocusing on blogging. The next hot social network might just be built out of blogs.
Full disclosure: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com is funded by True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM.
We have a built an application with similar objectives. Soon we will be adding real-time communication capabilities as well. As you have noted, OpenID and OpenAuth will be th facilitating technologies.
Also as Moshe Maeir notes in the trackbacked post, traditional social network and our application will complement each other. In our view traditional SNs are like public social gathering places like bar and we view our application to be like one’s living room. Both have their roles in one’s social life.
Back to blogging? yes!
Person-centric? Hell YES!
WordPress? Nope.
What if I want to stay with Blogger or Live Journal? Same problem as with Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/etc… you still have to join something[WordPress] to “network”, you have to choose one product/service over another. That is NOT how we network in real life! In RL we network in various ways/medias that overlap and that seems to work on-line also… blogs, email, chat, groups, skype, etc.
You guys need to get out of the valley and go to other parts of America and the world and talk to REGULAR users. Most people when they use word press for the first time find it difficult and cumbersome , unless they are in the tech industry. It’s a great idea and a nice article, but a little dose of reality and practicality never hurt anyone.
More bad press for Facebook from India site reporting about Head hunter tactics. According to the report, potential recruiters would be checking out your profile (social networking) to make the career relevant decision.
http://www.techbanyan.com/archives/83
I think Gravatar now being a part of WP also swings the decision in favor of WP.
OpenId is great idea to move close to Semantic Web World. And if WordPress can integrate it into their solution, i think it will start a wave to support it and eventually, Facebook types of business will come around and dance together.
Hello,
I just want to address something Valdis said: “you still have to join something[WordPress] to ‘network’”. The DiSo Project is working on WordPress plugins that could be installed anywhere – be it a hosted service like wordpress.com or your own server. Yes, it means knowing how to run a blog, or know someone who does.
WordPress is a starting point (not the end goal) for us because it’s easy for a moderately technical user to manage, it’s open-source, and it isn’t – life Blogger – limited to a single provider. If you have suggestions or ideas, join the group and participate.
Thanks,
–Steve
http://redmonk.net // http://diso-project.org
As much as I’d love WordPress to become the next center for social activity, I think it’s a pipe dream. Of my 500+ contacts on Facebook, 10 of them know what WordPress is, and only 1 actually uses it — me.
The reason Facebook is so successful (and Myspace too) over competing services is, quite frankly, how easy they’ve made it for the average person to use. As the technorati, we ooh and aah when Facebook implements Ajax loading for photo albums; most people just think its a cool effect.
There’s a reason so many blogs get created each day — but then die a couple months (if not weeks or days) later. Most people just dont have the persistence to stick with blogging (myself included to an extent). Even as a WordPress evangelist myself (I use it for all my sites, my client sites, and I’m using WordPress MU for a new “social” project), I can’t envision a blogging platform superseding a true social network in usefulness.
I’ve defined with a few friends some project guidelines called Trustlet in september (based on a february concept): a system to allow distributed p2p social networking, platform indipendent.
A good way to make it working should be to distribute it both as a standalone service and as a WordPress integrated plugin. Maybe with OpenID for authentication and some sort of push system to allow real-time messaging (pull is slow, networking needs speed, see Twitter).
Another critical feature is trust, that should be integrated in this protocol. I was looking for integration with OpenSocial… maybe we could just use that protocol. :)
I agree that blogging and social networking are indeed a next step. However wordpress is a bit cumbersome for your average users. There are a ton of people out there that just don’t have an easy way to take advantage of this exciting technology. We have built a platform that allows the owner to have control of blogging and social networking features without having to conform. Blogging, social networking and static content should flow naturally and become as one.
BuddyPress was created for this purpose. This was started a few months back and appears almost complete. I covered this on the Social Times over a month ago:
http://www.socialtimes.com/2007/11/buddy-press-turns-wordpress-into-social-network/
Chris should partner up with the creator of BuddyPress. It looks like he needs some help.
We’re also working on enabling the open social web, but trying to minimize the work an end user has to do. Our service http://freemyfriends.com allows users to automatically rebuild their social networks on any site. Thoughts?
I have often thought “i must search out a blogging application for my Facebook profile…”
How stupid is that!
I love the way that facebook allows you to be connected to each other and follow each others movements, comments and updates but I also love the ability to write my own blog and maintain its appearance too.
MySpace is too messy and Facebook is too restrictive (which can be a good thing). WordPress is a very powerful platform and I think it could turn it’s hand to anything, given the right plugin.
Imagine if you could install a Social Networking plugin to WordPress that links you to other “friends” blogs to see their posts, comments and updates they left at other sites etc. You could even link into Flickr, del.icio.us and other sites too via RSS. Present that all on an extra “page” in your WP installation – done!
We do this as a service for clients in South Africa, and it is precisely this niché market where we fill the gap. WordPress is powerful and perfect for this purpose, but one does need a geek on call to run it full time as a serious publishing media or social network.
take a look at tumblr.com – there you can add other tumblelogs as friends…
Shame on you Chris. This is a very unoriginal ideas. You posted on your blog a while back about a little project called ChickSpeak (http://www.chickspeak.com). In your blog post (http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/07/18/wordpressmu-making-a-smart-platform-choice/) you spoke about how this project was one of the first to use WordPress as a social networking platform and encouraged the developer to open-source and share his plugins.
The project is now being developed at http://www.buddypress.com and is open source. Shame on you for stealing Andy’s thunder! Shame on you for not choosing to contribute to this project.
Best way to progess to the Semantic Web – keep those ideas coming and let’s move forward!
As a WordPress user and developer of web sites that use web press as the backend not only for blogging but also for general content management I find this interesting because I am also ready using tools the accomplish to a degree abit not totally integrated with WordPress itself apart from the RSS feeds it generates.
One of the things I will do is run the RSS feed generated and then managed through feedburner.com through a service called Twitterfeed at Twitterfeed.com. Notification of blog post and links will show up in my Twitter account for my followers to see. I also do this with my flickr RSS feed too. It doesn’t stop their. I also pipe my Twitter posts to Facebook via the Facebook Twitter application so even more people who don’t normally follow my blog or twitter feed but are in my circle of friends with get a notification that I have written something on my blog.
I’d love to centrally manage this through my WordPress admin panel but I would also like to extent my own site to have a social networking component.
Jim,
Please back up with the “shaming”…
Andy’s work on BussyPress is awesome, and I’m hoping that we can learn from each other. But BuddyPress is focused (from my reading) on using WordPressMU (the multi-user/multi-site version that is also being used on wordpress.com) to create social networking sites – connecting users hosted within that hosted instance of WPMU+BuddyPress (someone please correct my understanding if I’m wrong).
The DiSo Project is focused around helping WordPress users (or more specifically those running their own instances of WordPress) turn that blog into the focal point of their social network participation. The DiSo plugins are intended to help enable things like social network portability and identity consolidation in a distributed way – so the network grows organically, not dependent on a particular provider.
I hope we can collaborate with Andy to be sure that the work we’re doing on DiSo will be compatible with BuddyPress as much as possible.
Sincerely,
–Steve
http://redmonk.net/ // http://diso-project.org
Looks as though a lot of us are thinking along similar lines here. I’m very interested to see wordpress being used more for social networking, so DiSo sounds promising.
My own development work has also looked to bridge the gap between blogging and social networking, but focused on a group conversation system (using API keys to identify and authenticate members of blogging groups). Someone called it trackback on steroids, but I always wanted a system that could drive readers / traffic properly between blogs, to build identity and loyalty.
Looks like we might all end converging at a very similar point further down the line! :)
Sounds like an interesting comment. I do find my self spending more time reading blogs on Word Press than I spend on MySpace or FaceBook.
What’s the difference between this idea and Livejournal?
Should be interesting to see how long any non virtual reality social networks exsist after 5 years.
I think this is a brilliant, inevitable idea but I don’t see it taking off until something like Open Social allows a transition away from the existing social networking sites.
They may realize that by adopting Open Social they will enable competition and might shun it for that reason.
If my profile had restricted layers of detail I’d be more likely to add information to it. It would be nice if I could add my resume in some semantic format which would be accessible by search engines.
My guess is five years before this becomes the standard.
Kirk,
“If my profile had restricted layers of detail I’d be more likely to add information to it.”
See http://microformats.org/wiki/openid-brainstorming#OpenID_whitelist_authentication_for_private_hCard and read about what Tom Morris is doing.
“It would be nice if I could add my resume in some semantic format which would be accessible by search engines.”
See: http://microformats.org/wiki/hresume
Cheers,
–Steve
http://redmonk.net // http://diso-project.org
Interesting article. I agree with everything said because WP is getting bigger and more people are starting to finally use it. It will one day take over the world.
Hi, dear all
the wordpress is a nice weblog
I know I have a vested interest in this – but surely we should get past this idea that ‘the next’ ’social network’ will be anywhere in particular. Comments from users here show that people want to use the tools they want to use – not someone else’s choice of the ‘perfeect’ tool. Social networks should exist in widgets what can be embeddd in the users choice of destination.
in2community (www.in2community.com/betaprogram) is a distributed social networking application built on a SaaS platform that is not only easy to install, it’s free.
By embedding one line of code into a dedicated HTML page, both bloggers and webmasters can introduce social networking services directly on their own websites. Publishers who use this service become part of the greater in2apps (www.in2apps.com) network based on a categorical definition of their website, and can immediately have their social communities populated with relevant and localized information from compatible publishers to create a critical mass of like-minded users.
in2community is currently looking for beta trial participants so if you are blogger looking for a social networking solution, this just might be the answer.
I have been a long time user of WordPress – its excellent, and the many plugins are varied and of high quality. However, as a social platform, its sorely lacking. MU has not been revamped in some time, while Movable Type Social (which runs gothamist.com I believe) is quite powerful off the shelf. I like wordpress better overall, but they need to get in the direction of MT Community.
This won’t work because:
A. 99% of people on social networks have no interest in blogging (go look at any average dude’s myspace or facebook page, and wa-la! no blog entries, or at least none since they originally signed up! and most of them feature the word ‘test’)
and
B. WordPress is way too advanced for the casual user, even if you created the most intuitive UI for WP, it will still be too complicated for the regular myspace or facebook user. I have messed around with all the fun php that makes up the guts of WP, and as someone with very advanced web design and developement skills, its still intimidating.
Its a great idea, but if you build it….. you need people to come!
I think the balance of freedom and ease will be the key, but saying the WP is the future social network is a bit shortsighted.
DiSo is built on ideas around OAuth, OpenID, and Microformats like hcard and XFN. If you take the time to understand these, they will fully understand what DiSo will become. OAuth, OpenID, hcard, XOXO, and XFN are all open standards that anyone developer can play with today. Open Social tried to re-create this all with proprietary standards. And where is Open Social toady? The hype from last month is gone. An it seems it is really only open to the big network apps like MySapce, Freindster, Orkut. I don’t see any blog posts about hackers saying “hey, look what I did with open social” because it is not open.
Self-hosted WordPress is the best place to start for this idea. It is open, a lot of people use it. DiSo could become a set of standards that will power other applications all over the web that have nothing to do with blogging or social netowrking. DiSo+WordPress will be a proof of concept using several existing open standards. That’s all. Those that understand the benefits will use it. Those that don’t will come around later. DiSo could be a fork of WordPress. DiSo may or may not become part of Worpdress.com hosted blogs. It is too early to tell.
BuddyPress seems really cool. I cannot wait to play with it. But BuddyPress is kind of like having your own, LiveJournal or install (that means multiple blogs, multiple users, networked together). It can be public or private. It uses WordPressMU. This allow for multiple blogs to run on one server. It is great for communities or even intranets.
DiSo will allow separate self-hosted WordPress installations to talk to each other in new and cool ways. Sort of like how anyone can e-mail anyone else. Email apps can send Email to other e-mail apps. Not just Yahoo mail to Yahoo mail or only Hotmail to Hotmail. They reason email works across email apps is because they all use the same standards. Now expand the idead beyond email, trackbacks, friending, blogrolls, think of and think of all the Facebook applications that are out there. That will be possible with OAuth+OpenID+hcard+XOXO+XFN=DiSo.
@daniel: When this is all working well people who don’t blog will sign up thinking it’s a social network. Blogs aren’t some amorphus inevitability, eventually we’ll probably all just have online profiles that include blogs optionally, not the other way around. Imagine if all blog software had admin panels that included profile info like the Facebook/MySpace.
WordPress is popular, open source, and has a good plugin system so it seems like a good place to start.
There is a solution to the open source craze, if you look at places like facebook who use steadily available and readily developed software, and then at places like http://www.contineo.co.uk who used open source based development platforms, you can automatically see which i would prefer! The latter has many more features and is easily customisable to suit visitor needs.
@Kirk: As bad as Myspace is, it already does have a fully functional blog built into any/all profiles. Facebook has about 100 applications that let you build custom blogs inside of their API as well. It doesn’t sound like this would be anything new if you are saying that online profiles will have optional blogs, since they already do.
look, i don’t understand the technology and the differences between open and closed systems, blogging v social networking etc. it’s just ‘people fascinated in people’ to me. and if it means that WP becomes the next big thing and that many 1000’s more people find their way to my incredibly interesting site, then so be it. bring it on
fpb
@daniel: I see your point but there is a huge difference. There is no incentive for MySpace and Facebook to adopt standards. In fact they need proprietary profiles to keep people from migrating to the competition.
It’s about more than features, it’s about open standards. We need openness to address privacy concerns and standards for interoperability.
I must be way ahead of the game with this one considering i took this concept and drove it home a while ago on my social site… http://www.socialchris.com
I actually used to run my blog in this fashion. I moved from blogger, to wordpress, then eventually drupal. I used it as a mashup of various web services like for my flickr pictures, twitter updates, etc. I still kind of use it that way, but have moved much of the stuff to facebook do to their application platform. The problem I noticed with this, is it was too open. There where things I only wanted to share with my friends, but the problem is I don’t want my friends to have to login to their site, mine into theirs, facebook breaks down a lot of these barriers and makes things more organic by allowing many people to build a lot of the applications for it. Now I know there are many open standards coming out, and with things like openID this may eventually be the case, but just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.
Blogging – explained in an abstract way – is sequencing and publishing short text messages. Blog postings are published, read and forgotten about quickly. Blog postings are not so person-centric as described here. Publishing about oneself is different from just publishing oneself. Social network pages show profile information and preferences not easily to be learnt from blog postings. I think a personal knowledge management and publishing system using blogs, micro-blogs, and conventional publishing would be a better starting point for a unified social graph or open social network.
I myself developed the Semantic Wiki ‘ArtificialMemory’ (www.artificialmemory.net) to show how realy person-centric application and content could look like.
:-) Lars
Thanks for the heads-up about DiSo. However, I think that this post is rather too WordPress-centric. In terms of coding, the DiSo project starts from some existing GPL’d WordPress plugins. That’s because these plugins provide a useful starting point, rather than because there’s anything WordPress-specific about DiSo.
I made these points in a post on my WordPress.com blog last night, but the ping hasn’t shown up here yet.
Already doing this. ;) Been for a year actually.
WordPress is not even close to the same thing as a Social Networking site
A Social Network, would be more like a discussion forum, a place where people collaborate with one another in a open social way. WordPress is just a blog, a content management system for a single or company website, it is not even close to the same thing. blogging and social networking are two entirely different entities.
Think of it like this: I am going to make a personal helicopter. Instead of doing this from scratch, I am going to star by hacking this lawnmower. Don’t criticize until I’m done.
Anne, awesome post! Just call it a social network, “social graph” is distracting to a lot of people.
What am I missing? Why not just integrate with FOAF? Why build own tool from scratch and not integrate with Elgg instead?
Just curious…
I honestly think most of the social networking sites existing now cater to a very small set of population. There is a whole set of population which is ignored by warm valley planers.
There needs to be something which is widely done normally and is not yet implemented on web (something like what ebay did for auctions which was there for thousands of years).
May I respectfully suggest you’re reading the wrong blogs?
There are not too many other open source web apps that use microfromats extensively. The WP dev community and the Microformats communities share members, have the same “culture” if you will. And many of the developers and architects know each other personally, so they are more likely to work with friends. If there were another platform that would win due to meritocracy, the developers would already know each other, and that platform might have been chosen. For some reason, the Microformats community prefers XFN over FOAF, and they probably have a good reason. XFN is already built-in to WordPress. The WordPress developer plug-ins has a thing for Microformats. That is just where the momentum happened to go.
I was saying this two years ago, or maybe it was three, but gave up on the “control your content” speech when I realized how high the hurdle is. We already run blogs, we take for granted the steep leaning curve.
Well, didn’t WordPress (Automatic?) just recently buy Gravatar? In a way Myspace is just a big collection of Gravatars. To me it’s not that interesting of an idea, because if I want to trade links with another blogger I can do that without much trouble. And I don’t see the point of trading links with lots of bloggers, which would probably dissolve PR. So I don’t see the need for an automated system like mybloglog.
Everyone with a broadband connection can run their own Content Management System(CMS) on their home computer if the server and CMS is easy to install and operate. For a live demo, check out: http://barracudadrive.net/
I think they’re on to something here. Wow. Great post.
I don’t see why not.
I hate Social Networking in the first place. And, oh no. WordPress too ? Oh well. We got another martyr for this madness.
Whats really needed is a open protocol for social networking applications. It has to have a strong basis in crypto, key management, p2p networking etc… Each person will essentially own their digital identity and social graph data. They will retain complete control over how they wish their data to be accessed and by who. How its implemented is not as important. But for best results it should probably be a combination of a desktop application and online web service. None of this is a trivial engineering task nor is there much of a profit motivation so this is just a wish without much hope of actually happening anytime soon.
I thought that Email was the Ultimate Social Environment. http://gigaom.com/2007/09/20/is-email-the-ultimate-social-environment/
I can’t keep up!
I also believe that blog centric networking is the natural evolution. Using platforms like Blogger to aggregate a lot of the information that you can see in the many standard social networking platforms that you use today.
I am already doing this. I wanted to build a unified social network site that combined the best features of blogs and portal sites, while balancing the needs of the individual with those of the community. I am pleased to say it is qute a success so far. I am testing with a small (undr 100) group of users to see how the database is affected. but WordPress is very flexible it seems.
for those interested in what might be the next thing, check out Lucid Magazine at http://www.lucidmag.com
The next big social network will probably be MateCube. Just read about it on digg. What do you think? http://www.matecube.com
I have an early stage company which involves an online community of bloggers and video. Initially I was going to do a membership based model where members pay a fee, but I have decided to take on the advertising model. (I need some advice though on how to base the advertising fees since I haven’t found anything yet on a Google search of YouTube’s model and how they arrived to those figures). My members will have profiles similar to myspace where they can post their own blogs to show off their knowledge and allow web visitors to read or subscribe to each member’s blogs. Someone recommended Word Press MU to me. I’m not sure if hosted is the way to go or to host my blog on my own server. There will be no interaction in the members’ blogs with their readers, but the members will be allowed to post their comments for pure reading enjoyment. This way, a user won’t have to weed through spam.
I will also offer sub-domains where my members can have user feedback on their blogs. Any advice?
With all these social networks, blogging, email, PDA’s, cell phones, texting and IM’ing do people actually spend MORE time in touch— or do they spend more time in the process of staying in touch…?
Well I must say, I enjoyed reading your material.
Great article… As more and more users like to share their thoughts, and their behavior on blogs I’m sure wordpress will become a social network
WordPress is a social network, The way they have their system set up, it is a very active social program. When you make a new post on wordpress, you can have decent traffic within a few mins if you know how to use tags and write titles.
wordpress is actually probably the best social network site there is.
This is very interesting topic about the wordpress. I have been playin around wordpress myself and figure out that the flatform has a very versatile usage in terms of social networking. If this web flatform can handle uploading video rating comments and other plugins that might be use to build a social networking website like facbook, youtube and myspace this could be a break through of wordpress.
This is a very interesting article about wordpress. Our company uses wordpress to issue press releases and company info. I do think that if done right it can be an effect mass media tool, although I don’t know if i necessarily agree that it’s going to bump myspace anytime soon!
Hi,
I think the best way it will work if wordpress could “balance” as virgil the pilgrim said between all features. I would hate to see wordpress become the next Vbulletin and tarnish their core business; atleast in my mind.
I also agree with many of the posts that word press already has networking capabilities and should never get away from their core..blogging.
I would like to see a more corporate wordpress come out for small businesses. Our company builds Social Networking Software and there is large disconnect between the “bloggers” of the day and the corporate world…where the money really is.
I think adding a networking feature that is more geared towards internal employee interaction with wiki features would be extremely helpful for a companies growth.
WebBiz
I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years now and find it more and more useful everyday. I’ve been setting up all of clients on WordPress so that they can have the ability to have a website, edit and change everything on it from one admin, without the need for programming knowledge or expensive programs, and be able to blog and communicate with their audience. From my experience with WordPress, I personally think that WordPress can be used for a lot of various website applications, and not just blogging. I’ve set up a e-commerce storefront in WordPress and sold products, built a social community with others contributing, and even a standard website with just a few pages. Not to mention the hundreds of free templates and plugins that are already built for the community, which can make a novice look good and be up and running within hours. I’m a big fan of WordPress and think they are on the right track when it comes to web 2.0 social aspects.
Is the blog software you’re running SQL based on your own server, flatfile? or hosted elsewhere? I’m in need of a blog for my site and would appreciate any help you could give.
Thanks in advance
~[RAGE]
hım..
Using platforms like Blogger to aggregate a lot of the information that you can see in the many standard social networking platforms that you use today.
Is the blog software you’re running SQL based on your own server, flatfile? or hosted elsewhere? I’m in need of a blog for my site and would appreciate any help you could give.
Thanks in advance
great article and great information
I also believe that blog centric networking is the natural evolution. Using platforms like Blogger to aggregate a lot of the information that you can see in the many standard social networking platforms that you use today.
also believe that blog centric networking is the natural evolution. Using platforms like Blogger to aggregate a lot of the information that you can see in the many standard social networking platforms that you use today.
Great article focusing on the advances and setbacks of social networking. Blogging does off a more personal approach to social networking that Facebook and MySpace try to simulate.
I think Gravatar now being a part of WP also swings the decision in favor of WP.
Really necessary article to be able to focus on the advances of social networking.I will give a place for it in my web site
I think Gravatar now being a part of WP also swings the decision in favor of WP.
Thanks for this article. Good idea.
Like Daniel said 99% of “social networkers” don’t blog.
I have created over 15 community sites and I see it everywhere.
Social Network Web Designer
Thanks for posting about this, I would like to read more about this topic.
i very like this subject maybe i ll be use and thaks
thank you for your command.
thanx command live
Found a social network that rewards you for doing what you already do !
Create and Star In your own Television Shows. Get your own channel with your own time slot . Plus get a great online Community . What makes this so unique is that you will be rewarded for every Viewer who comes to your page or friend you sign up for the site .
http://www.sidetick.com/signup.php?signup_referer=19841
There are not too many other open source web apps that use microfromats extensively. The WP dev community and the Microformats communities share members, have the same “culture” if you will. And many of the developers and architects know each other personally, so they are more likely to work with friends. If there were another platform that would win due to meritocracy, the developers would already know each other, and that platform might have been chosen. For some reason, the Microformats community prefers XFN over FOAF, and they probably have a good reason. XFN is already built-in to WordPress. The WordPress developer plug-ins has a thing for Microformats. That is just where the momentum happened to go.
thankss