Social it is! If you can make your site a social platform for you community then you win. Easy.. well no. I'm starting to think that we've come yo the point with the excellent selection of components available that we should add these features as standard, and I also think that this is a mistake.
Let me take an example, a sport governing body. Like most they have the usual collection of news, articles, galleries, calendars and the like, but are now talking about getting a social area on their site. They already use Facebook reasonably well and their following is growing. There is also another site that deals with the social / user generated side of the sport already which is doing really well. With all this existing content on existing platforms, I'm struggling to think of a reason why they should spend the time and effort (the day-to-day work involved rather than the initial set-up effort) implementing their own social site. I think that it would become a poor cousin to the other sites that are out there, with peoples efforts going on maintaining their status / photos / comments on the existing platforms. I do strongly believe that a half-used platform gives a very poor impression on those who are looking at it for the first time, and nothing looks worse that a dead or dying idea.
Let's not all jump on the Social site bandwagon, if it's needed then it'll be really obvious. Applying the 37signals scheme of feature requests, I find, is always a good idea...
How do you track all these requests? You don’t. Read them and then throw them away. Yup, read them and throw them away. The ones that are really important will keep bubbling up
While this may not win me too many friends, I also think this is true with the Joomla! people site. I've an account on there, and I've logged in only a handful of times. I know JomSocial have put in an epic amount of time and work into their platform so I take my hat off to them, however I don't find it quick and easy to use as Facebook for example. I'm finding that I simply don't have the time of day to go on to people.joomla.org to check things, once I've done my days' work, dealt with twitter, facebook, email and my home life. Does it offer much more than the ATAAW site? It's not offering me anything new than I already have... everyone I have contacts on there I've got because of Twitter or Facebook contacts anyway. With the J! forum, Facebook groups, Twitter conversations, ATAAW (which has it's own usability problems that I've not worked out yet - if it sends me an email about a message I want to read that message in my email, not have to log into the site every single time to see if it's relevent to me) - how many of these platforms are we expected to be connected too?
I do worry that I'm missing stuff because I'm not checking it, but not enough to make me check it. If anything big comes up I'm sure Brian Teeman will tweet about it anyway!
