Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn't require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart's recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn't too far behind, either - a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?
With the latest release of Movable Type 4.2, publishers can easily add forums, community blogs, and group blogs to their site. Site members can establish customizable profiles with avatars and can follow their friends. Given the correct permissions, community members can submit content for publishing on the site for the admin to approve. Those submissions will then display next to the comments on the submitter's user profile. Site members can also vote on content they like, too, a feature MT is calling "Digg in a box."
In addition to the changes in MT, Six Apart has also introduced a new plugin called "Action Streams." This plugin is very much inspired by FriendFeed, as it lets you aggregate and share your content from around the social web. In other words, Movable Type has just introduced their own self-hosted lifestream. (We had a feeling this was coming).
An Action Stream
So where is WordPress's social network? It's still under development. Unlike MT, social networking with not be a feature of WordPress - instead, the WordPress MU core is being used to build out a next-gen publishing platform called BuddyPress . Essentially, BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called "the wire," which sounds a lot like Twitter.
With both of the big players extending their traditional blogging platforms to offer social networking features, you have to wonder if traditional blogging is on its way out. For many years, web pundits have been saying that social networking would gain in popularity to such an extent that it would become a feature, not a destination in and of itself. These latest designs from MT and WordPress seem to prove that point.
In fact, even on today's blogs, publishers have already been adding social networking features to their sites through the use of blog plugins that offer things like FriendFeed integration, for example. (Case in point: RWW has integrated with FriendFeed). Also, by adding Disqus as a site's blog commenting system, bloggers were including a social network of sorts, as well. Like with MT 4.2, Disqus users can establish profiles, follow users, and track their comments across sites from one page.
The only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where's Facebook Friend Connect? Where's Google Friend Connect? Where's your portable social graph in all this?
These new publishing platforms will power the social web of the future, but without tools to make all these disparate social graphs meld together, the people who are actually participating will become even more frustrated than they are today. The need for data portability is even stronger than ever, but we need there to be a clear winner in the game before our lives can improve.
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Posted by: Jason Carreira
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August 14, 2008 8:36 AM
I'm still wondering why no one ever talks about Elgg when it comes to creating a niche social network site.
Posted by: Stupid Blogger
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August 14, 2008 8:38 AM
Good call on the disparate social graphs.
Posted by: Hao Chen
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August 14, 2008 8:40 AM
Agreed... building a social network right now built on WordPress for our local twitter community -> http://dmtweetup.org
Posted by: andy brudtkuhl
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August 14, 2008 8:52 AM
@Stupid Blogger - Elgg is pretty cool
Posted by: andy brudtkuhl
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August 14, 2008 8:53 AM
We've just spent the last month tweaking some servers at Rackspace and getting Wordpress really humming (lovin' it too). I'm immediately going to get in touch with our head developer and let her know about BuddyPress. I've already worked out in about 2 mins some new services that we'll be empowered to offer.
Posted by: Fletchnz | August 14, 2008 9:02 AM
Hi all,
I just wanted to give some huge credit to Olivier, our programmer here in France who customized wordpress (not WP MU) completely to help us build www.ladiesroom.fr the first woman social magazine/social network in France.
Olivier created everything from scratch with WP : multiple users accounts (we have 5000+ members writing for the magazine), friendslist, internal mail system, friendsfeed,profile pages, customizable avatars and it also includes the admin part where we build the homepage everyday from dozens of articles written by our members.
I think, but I am not a dev, that he did something really great, maybe better than buddypress. If you guys are specialists it would be great to have your take on that
Thank you very much.
Arthur
Posted by: Arthur Kannas | August 14, 2008 9:43 AM
I've been following feedback for the new Movable Type version - I think it's filling a need for big content and media publishers wanting the added social networking functionality for their readers. The new version seems very exciting to me, but I agree with you it does create additional profiles to maintain - and more social networks to keep up with per blog you subscribe to (which will probably be more than just two more, depending on how many blogs will upgrade to these new versions).
Posted by: ocpinay | August 14, 2008 9:45 AM
Elgg classic was very good, now elgg one is much better. And it was a software intended for social nets, not a converted =)
Posted by: Arturo Servin
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August 14, 2008 10:10 AM
Andy Peatling will be talking about BuddyPress (WP-based social network project) at WordCamp SF on Saturday... good timing.
Posted by: Mark Jaquith
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August 14, 2008 10:11 AM
In regards to Wordpress allowing for a portable profile: at the very least it will provide OpenID integration via an easy plugin install.
Posted by: Christopher Yates Jarvis | August 14, 2008 10:34 AM
Hi Sarah, thanks for writing up some of what we've done with Movable Type Pro -- our whole community is really excited about what MT can do now, and I think you've captured some of the new ideas that are really inspiring people to rethink what their sites can do for a community.
I'd highlight a few points that might clarify some of the points you've raised. First, We totally agree that there are legitimate worries about social networking fatigue, or an unwillingness to create new profiles, at least amongst those of us who are tech geeks and tend to sign up for lots of sites. So, our model in Movable Type is to let all of those services federate together. Action Streams, which you mention above, are a key part of this, but there are lots more examples to have we've invested more than anyone in the idea of open, interoperable social networking.
* Movable Type was the only blogging platform onstage at the Facebook Connect launch, where we demonstrated working code that will be shipping as a plugin shortly.
* OpenID was invented at Six Apart, and is supported by Movable Type right out of the box. In less than three years, half a billion OpenIDs have been created, and new services like MySpace are coming online all the time.
* Our community's created two-way synchronization with services like FriendFeed, so you don't have to worry about losing comments that happen on other sites.
* Connecting your services together requires powerful APIs and good developer adoption of them, and we co-created OAuth at Six Apart and have shipped features like commenting API support in MT 4.2 to make it even easier to plug these pieces together. (That OAuth support is why, for instance, MT was the first platform to support Yahoo's Fire Eagle.)
* Most importantly, Action Streams can work with services like Blog It, which can live in Facebook or on your iPhone, and let you form two-way connections with the other services and devices that you use.
I know I've rambled on a good bit here, but the short version is: These new communities that are forming are not going to be islands. We don't have a vision of thousands of disconnected communities, but rather that all of us as individuals will be able to seamlessly bring our identities to any communities that we choose.
And finally, all of the pieces I've talked about here are real, and exist, and are shipping today. I know there's always this desire to see these technology platforms as being in some kind of horse race, but frankly it's ridiculous to present a collection of unreleased plugins as equivalent to Movable Type's community features, which are shipping today, power huge sites like BoingBoing and the Washington Post, and have been tested and proven to be reliable and secure.
Honestly, I hope that every platform starts to evolve and adopt open standards like OpenID and OAuth and Action Streams and the other technologies that will make open social networking possible, but for right now, the only platform that makes these things possible is the one made by the folks who invented them: Movable Type.
Posted by: Anil | August 14, 2008 10:46 AM
It will be interesting to see if BuddyPress can compete in the enterprise social networking space.
Posted by: martinmedia
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August 14, 2008 11:35 AM
Yes, Elgg should be looked at as well. It is coming out with version 1 on the 18th of this month. I have been testing it out and it is looking very good.
Posted by: Al | August 14, 2008 11:44 AM
bolog and ne
Posted by: adolfo foronda
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August 14, 2008 11:52 AM
These new sites are basically combining multiple sites to make one new one. Combining Wordpress with forums, rating content capability, and profiles etc, is basically like a MySpace and a Facebook, just calling it something different, and G-d knows we have enough social networking sites, I think there's one for every possible situation imaginable..you got ones for Business Networking, Friend Networking, Cooking Networking, Music Networking, you name it, they have it, personally I'm a little tired of them, time to come up with something new altogether.
Posted by: Jeff | August 14, 2008 12:05 PM
Sarah, I didn't know about the Action Streams plugin, but I liked DavidRecordon website so much that I did my own c# script to generate something like that. http://www.alexsauceda.com
Posted by: Alex Sauceda
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August 14, 2008 12:36 PM
Have you considered that Ning is already allowing people to set up their own social network with the ease of Wordpress? It literally take just a few minutes for you to create a social networking site (Just like Seth Godin did with www.triiibes.com).
Posted by: Dawson Hunter | August 14, 2008 12:42 PM
Is this a bloggers communitie web sites killer? maybe. if adding friends will allow more collaboration (mutual projects or cross blog guest posts) then this is great news. I'm not sure that tradition blogging is going away. The discussion(comment) seems to.
Keren
Posted by: Keren Dagan | August 14, 2008 1:01 PM
not only are social networks going to be powered by movable type/ wordpress etc. but i think it's also interesting to see that the "new website" = wordpress/movable type, etc. a website is not longer about a static page, a blog is almost expected nowadays.
j
Posted by: jacob morgan | August 14, 2008 1:11 PM
Funny. I was searching Digg.com for this art... er post and leave a comment there. I typed in the beginning of the title "The Next Social Networks" and found one post in particular made end of last year (click here) titled: "The Next Social Network: WordPress".
Personally, after having played with Del.icio.us, Diigo, Facebook and whatnot, I recently came to the conclusion that sharing with no return/feedback from anybody has little meaning so when comments are better valued than 'clicks', 'diggs', 'votes', 'shares' whatever digg-like website can think of it will really mean the beginning of the construction of a social network. Until now I haven't seen much taking that direction.
Make people talk with each others instead of at each others.
Posted by: lelapin
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August 14, 2008 1:14 PM
For those of you commenting about Elgg, you may be interested in this older post where we interviewed Elgg's founder: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/elgg.php
@Alex - nice job!
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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August 14, 2008 1:30 PM
I hope not. Wordpress has terrible security and if this is the way it goes no site will be secure... so go ahead, i will enjoy seeing all the sites hacked when this happens....
Posted by: Jeremy | August 14, 2008 1:36 PM
For those of you mentioning Elgg, you may enjoy this older post where RWW interviewed the Elgg founders: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/elgg.php
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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August 14, 2008 2:20 PM
Really exciting stuff. I've been watching the markets, blog and Social Networks,converge,social network fatigue, blog overload and all. As many have well stated portability is the only way to scale the existing systems. I can't help but look at the MT and WP developments parallel to those of "social browsers," i.e. flock. There is an important convergence that both are offering, namely getting close by different avenues to "getting it all in one place" The browser represents the access point that will feed these new products. Browsers are essentially the gatekeepers, and they are getting into the aggregation game, rather than just search a fine line I admit. Word Press has already started to understand how critical this "baked in"relationship may be by partnering with Flock. MT would do well to move on the browser front as well.
Posted by: Robert | August 14, 2008 2:26 PM
Wordpress is bulky enough as it is. I think the best approach is to integrate with existing solutions that are already the best of their class, such as vbulletin, etc for forums, and pligg for digg. Just give us themes for each of them!
Elgg has a new demo site, but it's too slow for my taste. I have a social network running socialengine.net.
Posted by: katexter | August 14, 2008 3:52 PM
I disagree. This statement implies that social networking can only be done in a hierarchical fashion- that each site will have its own sub-network and ne'er the twain shall meet. In this model, yes- the only way to merge segmented social networks is for one contender to rise above the others and through their magnanimity publish APIs to allow the small-timers to access their network info, sort of like Facebook Connect.
On the contrary, I think these standalone solutions from WP and MT will indirectly promote a more heterogeneous architecture that is more in keeping with the structure of the internet itself. What we we need are open standards (ad hoc or otherwise) for sites to share networks, so that for instance, I can have a profile hosted on my own WP site that includes Facebook, Myspace, Wordpress, Moveable Type, etc. profiles directly in my network- and vice versa. If enough standalone sites go the independent route for their social networking rather than hook directly into the big social networking sites, such an open model will become the only way to defragment the social networking scene; and it will be in Facebook et al's interest to take part in it.
Long term, this will mean the social networking sites will have to compete with more than just scale (that is, getting people to join just so they can interact with their friends who are already on the site). I think this will have benefits all around.
Posted by: madcap | August 14, 2008 7:16 PM
Makes perfect sense. Some have been talking about a "Web 2.0 bubble", as with the "Internet bubble" that burst in the late nineties, these bubbles have nothing to do with technology per se. They have to do with business models some companies have that simply are not sustainable. Looks like the next generation of WordPress and Movable Type will be part of the new wave that will drown some of the current companies that are flying high with questionable fundamentals.
Posted by: Peter T Webshop | August 14, 2008 8:15 PM
You forget to mention Drupal (Open Source too)in your article. Not only Drupal had blog (in fact multi-blogs) and very strong community features since his beginning in year 2000 and not recently as the 2 products of your article. You have a very strong granularity access for the members features. You have also a Facebook API. You have also an powerful global API, 2000+ modules (you can do your own), flexible CCK for the data input and VIEWS for the output presentation. It means that you can manipulate and map the input and the date output as you want.
You have also jQuery in the core, jQuery UI through a module (for a good web 2.0 UI), tons of multmedia modules, voting system, digg like module and so on.
They got the 2007 CMS Award from Packt Publishing.
Posted by: clo75 | August 14, 2008 10:46 PM
Interesting post Sarah
The issue here is that we are seeing just more stovepipes in the SocNet space - I think you are right, that blogs *could* be the "personal webpage" of an Open SocNet, but I think its a few steps down the line. Not sure I'd trust Wordpress though, it's security is dodgy (cf its hacking by black hat SEOs that is meme's ing around Twitter right now)
@29 - We wrote our website in Drupal, but it is so powerful (ie complex) that it is overkill for simple apps like most blogs - we set up our blog (Broadstuff) in Serendipity, which is a halfway house between Drupal and Wordpress in capability.
Posted by: alan p | August 14, 2008 11:37 PM
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Posted by: augustine | August 15, 2008 4:59 AM
I agree that social networking features will become an expected feature of publishing systems. Instant Goodness has been offering self-publishing tools with integrated social networking features for a while. IMHO, the holy grail is a system that allows easy-to-use, feature-rich self-publishing tools with complete integration to Facebook, MySpace, Google, and other major social networks. Unfortunately, it seems that no one has been able to make the social graph portable to publishing platforms is an simple, intuitive way.
Posted by: Matt K | August 15, 2008 5:39 AM
portable data..? ELGG again - Open Data Definition (www.opendd.net) sounds like the kind of "independent route" that madcap is suggesting .. and I agree.
Why stop with just your "ID" being "Open" after all?
Posted by: share and share alike | August 15, 2008 5:48 AM
@30
Just a precision : the complexity not belongs to Drupal but to the scope of goals sometimes we have to achieve in social web developpment. Drupal is a very good balance between power and ease of use and you can go to industrial scale.
If you have for exemple to develop links between your platform and says, an in-house external database, even if you have a very friendly publishing platform, the developpment will be complex.
What we can really call complex web publishing platform are Typo3 and EZ Publish.
Posted by: clo75 | August 15, 2008 6:11 AM
@33: Are you madcap's brother or another alias?
It's as if you think you people are the only ones having this discussion.
DataPortability, OpenID, OpenAuth, the Diso project (on google groups), and most recently the Open Web Foundation are all about the issues you are promoting.
Do you really think OpenID is just about ID? First things first pal, and they haven't even got that correct yet.
Please get over yourself(ves).
Posted by: Sam | August 15, 2008 6:41 AM
Internet Brands Inc. (INET) that has aquired Jelsoft a year ago has also released updates to their community tools packages supporting Social Networking, Blogging, Project Management and more. With upcoming versions 3.8 and 4.0 it looks very promising and as a total community solution perhaps 'blog' software like wp or tp aren't even needed.
http://www.vBulletin.com/forum/ and their announcement forum has all the details.
Posted by: Santa | August 15, 2008 6:58 AM
Thanks for the shameless self promotion 'santa'!
I'm sure that Internet Brands INC will do very well in this market. Spamming comment sections of blogs is exactly how the media likes to interact, I've read it in the many missives of late regarding PR on the web today.
Are you really santa claus?
Posted by: Sam | August 15, 2008 7:18 AM
This seems incredibly unlikely. I want to be able to comment on the blogs I read, plain and simple. I don't need a forum, buddy list, private messaging, ect. on a blog. Why must everyone cram more and more "features" into every website.
Posted by: Karl Peterson | August 15, 2008 12:26 PM
There is something I don't understand in this current trend of social networking. Why is everyone still binding online identity to one or more social networks? Openid = you. Your email address = you. Even open data definition is (mostly) about synchronised online identities not about "the" online identity.
I don't believe it is problem with performance or stability to "social network" from single server in your own control. Similar has been done in instant messaging and irc for years. My ideal would be software mostly like wordpress that is single user and has support for necessary standards (mostly opendd, oauth). The identity could then be hosted at service of your choise, even home computer, relatively easily transfered to somewhere else, access would be easier to manage, private messaging would not rely on single server and it would have absolutely no (technical) impact on todays web services.
And just as a opinion. Would does have enough social networks and related tools. Those trying to catch up should focus on something that is significantly better. :)
Posted by: mkpaa | August 16, 2008 4:36 AM
I differ from you
Ashish
http://www.hmreviews.com
Posted by: Ashish | August 17, 2008 3:01 AM
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Posted by: EMMANUEL RICHARDS N. | August 17, 2008 11:03 AM
With BuddyPress, I believe every blog will have their own social network!
Posted by: Casor | August 18, 2008 8:47 AM
thank you best content
good night
Posted by: ahmet | August 19, 2008 2:21 PM
thank you dear friend
Posted by: ahmet | August 19, 2008 2:30 PM
MT 4.2 is more powerful than MT earlier editions.
Posted by: http://openid.hinn.cn/jackie/
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August 21, 2008 5:04 AM
I have a wordpress blog and want to integrate it with a social networking software. Does the wordpress has a plgin for social networking? If yes what is the name of it. Does someone uses and happy with it?
Posted by: SEO Blog | August 22, 2008 2:26 AM
It's interesting that this article does not mention MyBlogLog, which has been acting as a social network for bloggers for quite some time now.
Posted by: natc | August 22, 2008 5:38 AM
http://www.automk.com
Posted by: seagg | August 31, 2008 7:14 PM
Huh?
I'd certainly say goodbye social web and hello blogging over and over again...
Posted by: Spatt | September 1, 2008 5:27 AM
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