Can WordPress become the basis of a social network? Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg hinted today on his blog that WordPress might go in a more social direction. He announced a new hire, Andy Peatling, the developer behind BuddyPress, a social network built on top of WordPress. BuddyPress will now become an official WordPress project.
Peatling describes an earlier version of BuddyPress, ChickSpeak (a social network for college women). He built ChickSpeak (and BuddyPress) on top of a multi-user version of WordPress. He moved all the blog posts off to the side and made most of the real estate a profile page with messaging functionality. Finally, he took advantage of all the open-source plugins available for WordPress:
Wordpress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core - I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.
Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.
It is easy to dismiss this as completely unnecessary given the abundance of social networks already out there, as well as application development platforms like OpenSocial. But an open-source social network does present some intriguing possibilities. New apps and features could be added simply by creating new plugins. And there would be no lock-in to any proprietary code or development environment. Mullenweg writes:
Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
I asked Mullenweg if the world really needs another social network. His response:
The world doesn’t need another social network, it needs a thousand networks that let you own your data and interconnect using open standards. We invest countless hours giving our data to networks like MySpace, essentially sharecropping on their land for the privilege of being able to connect to our friends. It’s our friends, our time, our connections, our data — it should be our software.
I think only an Open Source solution can do that.
Automattic already hosts nearly 2.6 million blogs on Wordpress.com that generate more than 100,000 posts a day. That is a vibrant and big community. Could that be used to seed a social network? Even if BuddyPress remains a completely separate project, it will be interesting to see if it can out-innovate Facebook or MySpace or Bebo as a social networking platform. Does anyone think it has a chance?
Update: Strangely the GNU Public Licensed BuddyPress has had its page taken down by Automattic and replaced with default “coming soon” message with links to the code removed (cache of the original page here). Same with the project page on Google Code, the main page having only just been pulled as the original page is still available to be viewed via Google cache. A subsidiary page with access to the plugin hasn’t been deleted by Automattic yet and is available here. Update 2: The code is back up now. It was taken down temporarily in anticipation of a move to a new URL buddypress.org (not live yet).
I think it’s a great idea. I look forward to future wordpress enhancements
I definitely think that wordpress can go “social”, it is really great software and has a very strong foundation. I’m very excited to see how they approach this
Its certainly an idea. What’s important is that their efforts don’t end up losing focus on the original product that obtained all the users in the first place.
BA
http://nobosh.com/
This could have big potential. If bloggers can integrate social features via plugins on their blogs that carry over to other WordPress blogs it could give social network properties to blogs that are now islands.
Mmh, why they are taken over BuddyPress? I think the DiSo Projekt (http://diso-project.org) is a much more interessting idea because its decentral (so every self-hosted wordpress blog gets into a social networking profile.
Personally I would prefer a fully decentralised social networking system (so I created a protocol to realise this: http://cocur.org)
It’s for WPMU, not WP.
It sounds really innovative. Possibly the future of blogging. The merge of blogs and social networks through Plug-ins would be groundbreaking.
http://myspace.com/soundbeastdigital
-the ultimate digital music freedom
I think it can, and in the end, it will.
I knew this was coming and my thoughts is that it’s not coming just for wordpress.com but features for all wordpress hosted sites as well. Blogs will become individual social networks.
Wordpress is by far the best blogging platform out there… they have a huge untapped potential by going the social route… only makes sense to give the worlds loud mouths (of which I am one) yet another avenue to spread their ideas.
Jon
http://blog.legendarylife.com
Excited to learn about this! Hope they come up with a Social Networking integrated within WordPress or one that can be extended from WP.
Noticed that http://www.buddypress.com/ is down with Coming Soon message!
I am in the process of building out a membership system with profile pages etc on wordpress for http://diystartupnews.com
I have not looked at the MU platform but if its as good as wp then I will look at using it.
Hopefully this means that Automattic is finally realizing the benefit of all the stuff Six Apart (OpenID, Atom, Action Streams), Plaxo (shipping OpenSocial and the Social Graph API), Google (OpenSocial, Social Graph API, Atom, shipping OpenID), and the DiSo project (distributed profiles, shipping OpenID) have been advocating and building for months! While WordPress.com has lightly embraced OpenID, maybe this will also lead to their embracing the great WP-OpenID plugin for WordPress.org.
It is certainly interesting though that they chose to purchase BuddyPress versus working with the DiSo project to build distributed social networks. While the BuddyPress.com site is now just an Automattic logo (not really a good start for “Open and Free”), it seems that BuddyPress is actually more like Movable Type Community Solution –which powers sites like Boing Boing– and thus is being incorrectly described as “distributed social networking”.
I completely agree distributed social networking is great for blogging and great for the web. I truly hope to see Automattic engage the community that has already started creating and shipping this stuff instead of forgetting that it exists.
Oh boyoboyoboyo,..anudder social network. Den we can all be a beeg hapi famli. I can larn to rite and blog to all the udder nerds. We havin fun flamin the blogs and social sites. maybe wp sn can help sum of yuse guys get sum nookie. woodnt that be so kewl? ( eyeroll)
I am sooooo impressed.
Easy and open integration is what has given success to many software and web solutions and sounds appropriate here. Of course, what they propose may require some promotion before it’s truly adopted.
http://www.BlastCasta.com
anyone who thinks Wordpress has an “excellent plugin API” obviously hasn’t used a whole lot of APIs. It’s just an *easy* API because you’re writing great wads of php in whatever format or structure you like, that simply gets rolled into the app at runtime.
If this means turning WordPress.com into a social network then it’s a big yawn. The last thing anyone needs is yet another social network. What we need is the ability for a Facebook user to add a MySpace user as a friend. And a plugin for the self hosted (WordPress.org) blogs that allows them to do the same.
Nice and obviously reasonable for both “presses”, referencing my earlier comment — and congrats!
Sorry about the Google page, it’s been back for a few hours now. It was taken down in anticipation of the new Subversion setup, but that’s not quite ready yet.
also in need is to add xmpp (for im/twitter) to wordpress/buddypress
Matt:
I only have to say “good job”.
If Wordpress continue what to do what they do well then its a good idea otherwise they shouldn’t dilute the blogging platform in search of a social network. That would be not right, I think.
**yawn**
There’s already a “social Network based on a little blog software”.
It’s called DRUPAL.
What WP has, Drupal doesn’t — $$$ — or mightbe it’s time for Google to give $30M to/for Drupal, to make Drupal worthy of comparison to WP..
[how? you've only to see how Google's been blessing the Mozilla's..]
Before we go gaga over a WordPress social network, could we have a WordPress that plays nicer with widgets and plugins from existing social networks, web apps, etc.?
I know, I know… I’m a dreamer.
“There’s already a “social Network based on a little blog software”.
It’s called DRUPAL.”
which nobody cares about.
Now that WP enters into distributed social networking giving us “your software”, we need a richer set of WP APIs than what’s currently available.
Despite the many social networks out there Wordpress will probably be entirely different. In most social networks you create a profile, then invite your (real world) friends to create their own profiles, comment on your profiles and generally interact. Wordpress however is a blogging platform, so if it does indeed become a social network it will mostly be a network of bloggers and blog readers. This means instead of being a place to simply interact with people you already know, it will be a place for actual networking, that is you’ll be meeting new people with similar interests. This could therefore end up being more useful and addictive than regular social network, so Facebook and MySpace should indeed be worried.
While this is interesting news, I think that Automattic is missing the real potential here. We don’t need an open source social network platform powered by Wordpress. The world needs social network features to lay on top of a Wordpress blog community. This is a niche that is left untapped.
I speak from experience here, as I have worked to build TeachFor.Us off of Lyceum, an open-source multi-blog derivative designed to be more stable, expandable, and secure than Wordpress MU. Lyceum powers some very large blogging “communities” already, only there are no standard community features built into the platform.
TeachFor.Us is a community for Teach For America bloggers. As the community has grown, the need to build community-minded features that link a domain of blogs has become more and more apparent. Users are consistently asking for the social network type features in order to group blogs by site-wide categories, keywords and tags.
Unlike Automatic, neither TeachFor.Us or Lyceum is for-profit, so we’re waiting for the open source community to help us ratchet up our development. The lead developer for Lyceum had the nerve to get a “real job” in order to pay his bills.
Yes, Erick, there is a need for community linked social blogging. We just need to interpret that phrase differently than the way Automattic seems to be doing with their purchase of BuddyPress.
If anyone out there is looking to help… Lyceum could use you.
@28.. the older MyBlogLog, and the newer-to-be MyBlogFans, are blog-centric social networking communities…
Wow. This is deja vu all over again.
@26… yes, I’m supprised more people aren’t mentioning Drupal (used by FastCompany etc.) more in this topic.
If WordPress can give a community structure that sweeps away the isolated islands of irritation with their local Barons forcing trapped peasants to toil on their soil - someone mentioned sharecropping - then bring it on - OK Drupal is good and powerful, but it is not WordPress and doed not have the feelgood freindly face - can WP buy Drupal please
Should be interesting to see how many users wordpress.com would take away from other social networks like MYSpace and Face Book when it is up and running.
“WordPress” isn’t just one thing.
I use WordPress. Other sites use WordPress.
But my WordPress is the free service. Most other sites using WordPress are using the *software*.
It would help matters to clearly delineate which “WordPress” is being written about.
The WordPress I use is still too limited in allowing embedded video, for example. I can only do YouTube. I’d like to do *any* video that offers embedding, especially Veoh.
Great idea but I really think elgg.org has the best fully functional Open Source Social network on the web. Anyone can have a social network and become their own Myspace or Facebook.
I’m working on a gaming website based on elgg. Check it out at http://agzonline.net It’s still in beta and you can find more sites out at http://elgg.org.
That is hot. They totally have a chance.
Why? Because, MySpace, Facebook, and the other corporate types are not going to cannibalize their own businesses to provide this. They seem to act with the same shortsightedness as the record industry, or worse. Just look at Facebook’s Project Reekn’ Beacon and all their other privacy and other abuses (I mean “mistakes”), such as “you can signup, but you never leave,” at least not without finding some secret tunnel to your own private Facebook Redemption.
MySpace already is, and Facebook is quickly becoming, the AOL of Web 2.0. And that ain’t no compliment, to throw out a little Ebonics. Microsoft has become the Time Warner of the Web 2.0 era.
Facebook may have a CEO barely out of Romper Room, but by selling a big chunk (compared to other sales) to the Microsoft, they have sealed the deal. They are now “the man.” And “the man” likes the status quo. But, open source upsets the status quo, “disrupts” it, as they like to say in technobabble And gravity will pull things to open source. We have crossed the event horizon, entered the black hole’s gravitational field. There is no escape.
Cheers!
PS: I have a Wordpress am impressed with the quality these guys can deliver (and for free). I look forward to learning more about their platform, and possibly using it for one of our own projects.
I’m with the Drupal people here (and am surprised by any drupal hating in the comments). Drupal and WP are different - WP is blog plumbing, Drupal is community site plumbing.
Drupal is much more powerful and extendable than WP, but that’s not a slight against WP at all. WP is at it’s core a very powerful blogging CMS. Drupal is much more than just a blogging CMS. A drupal/WP alliance might make sense on some level given the modular nature of both and the large vibrant and enthusiastic development and user communities they have.
Also, while Drupal has no outside funding, its founder, Dries Buyaert, recently founded a for-profit company called acquia ($7mm in A-round funding) to create commercially supported Drupal installations.
Drupal is the real deal and here to stay.
Very cool. Love Wordpress!
David Recordon, why do you make it is DiSo vs BuddyPress? It isn’t a zero sum game. I introduced the Andy Peatling to Chris Messina in December, and they identified some synergies and also some differences in goals for their projects. I also invited DiSo to participate in WordPress’ application for Google Summer of Code.
Looking forward to having something like this. I’ve always steered away from myspace and facebook. Connecting with proprietors sounds much more appealing to me.
Lloyd, my point was much less about DiSo versus BuddyPress and much more about how Automattic seems to continuously not participate in awesome open source community efforts (like DiSo, OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial). These are some of the technologies that will change the web as we know it and actually deliver decentralized social networks; what TechCrunch and others are asking for.
I completely agree that there are great things to be done in a context of working with both BuddyPress and DiSo. Such as the thousands of niché social networks sharing avatars in a distributed fashion; the difference is in the approach. Automattic has chosen Gravatar (to be shipped in WordPress.org 2.5) which is a centralized approach to avatar management controlled by a single hosted service. DiSo has chosen the decentralized approach which uses open standards to discover the avatar when someone leaves a comment. Another analogous example is the Facebook News Feed compared to Movable Type Action Streams, FriendFeed, etc. Facebook pulls in activity from many places around the web, but it all remains within Facebook. Action Streams on the other hand both pull in your actions from around the web, but also republish the combined feed using both Atom and hAtom. These are the sorts of differences that are extremely important and the DiSo project is getting right!
This isn’t about WordPress versus Drupal or Automattic versus Six Apart, it is about how we can all as a community make the web better and revolutionize the services we use today.
David, your rhetoric bothers me a little. I’ve had experiences where it feels members of your team have specifically made it about Automattic vs Six Apart, but that is ok, comes with the territory, competition is a good thing.
I feel that Movable Type isn’t currently the fantastic example of open source that it has the potential of being. Also, maybe you can help WordPress and Movable Type customers getting their content out of TypePad. Last I checked there is no reasonable way to get posts’ permalinks out of TypePad. I’ve emailed with Ani Dash at length about this months ago — open social?
You wrote, “…chose to purchase BuddyPress versus working with the DiSo project to build distributed social networks…”, I don’t see how that sentiment can be viewed as anything other than an either/or us/them thing.
I appreciate your passion for the communites you are most active in, but why judge us? Our team is much smaller than Six Apart’s, and we are very focused on a large number of open source projects. If there are specific team members that you think would be an invalable participant in one of your projects, I’m sure they would love to be invited.
The little bit of extra time I have I tend to spend on GNOME and Ubuntu, and I would love to find more time for Firefox. Other team members I know are passionate about PHP, FreeBSD, and many other projects.
The wonderful thing is that our own projects don’t limit the awesomeness of those projects you listed, and if they did in some way — Chris Messina would be giving Matt and I an ear full
Lloyd, I’m glad that you guys, like us, have contributed to many open source projects and certainly understand the problem of wanting to do more but there being a finite amount of time. As it seems you’ve already reached a conclusion about Six Apart, I don’t know how I can dissuade you of that except to offer to talk any time you’d like. I’ll be back in SF next week, first beer is on me!
Thanks David, a huge step in pursuading me would be for TypePad customers to be able to export their content including posts’ permalinks. I appreciate that an Atom client can be written to do this and used, but as far as I know one doesn’t currently exist, and even then it isn’t convenient for most people just wanted to get their content.
NOT BAD!
Good post ,THANKS
深圳SEO
I’m surprised WordPress hasn’t had a bigger presence on Facebook yet. It would be feasible for them to integrate a social blogging feature in there, and I’m sure many people would use it. I had investigated wordpress mu for my app at http://humanpets.com, but ultimately rolled my own blogging solution hosting nearly a million mini-blogs now. Facebook doesn’t seem to have a real blogging solution integrated yet. If WordPress were to make “widget blogs” that could work as a great driver to their site as well.
http://humanpets.com/ - Flirting and dating community
This is just a plugin added to a WPMU-based install, not for regular self-hosted wordpress installs. just for those using WordpressMU to set up their own blog hosting site.
That being said, it will be interesting to see how this plays out for the whole community.
Do anyone know of any good dating sites?
http://www.xxxblackbook.com/?r=lc123514
Drupal doesn’t even have an out of the box wysiwyg editor.
*butstillrocks*