Social Network Features In Forum Software

[brad-t]

(05-15-2012 07:38 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  90% of the world does not use Failbook, and neither do I, so please don't bloat a forum system with that sort of trash.  Keep it as an official plugin perhaps, which at least makes it easier for me to eradicate all instances of it.

It's not important how much of the world uses Facebook, but how much of your target demographic uses Facebook -- or, at least, is comfortable integrating their Facebook with their forum profile? On my community I would imagine the number is fairly high versus a community like this full of technically minded people where there is a general negative sentiment towards Facebook.

(Also, Facebook has over 901 million active users -- even if we were conservative and cut this number in half, that is more than 10% of the world. And 10% of the world is a big enough number to care, anyway.)

That said, it should certainly be optional.

For non-technical communities, this kind of integration is only going to become more important as more and more people are growing up using Facebook for everything.

More than integration into other social services, forum software need to learn which features of social networking software to implement. Obviously none of us want MyBB to become pure social networking software, but we can look to popular social networks to decide what kinds of features tomorrow's users are going to expect, which include:

• more interactive personal pages
• better user-to-user messaging
• very fast sign-up process
• gamification elements
• Like system
  

just to name a few. A lot of these new features are going to piss off purists, but ultimately it's the only way for community software to stay relevant.

Ultimately, these kinds of features need to behave like "official" plugins, which is to be part of the package but with universal switches to completely remove them from the site if the administrator is not interested.