BuddyPress, the side project of blogging powerhouse WordPress, has just hit version 1.0 and has officially launched. It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress (MU — more on that below) blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.
Here’s what version 1.0 features: Extended profile, private messaging, friends, groups, “the wire,” activity stream, blog tracking and forums. Yes, that’s a lot of stuff in a first version — and it looks great (see the screenshots below). All of these features should be relatively straightforward from their names, except “the wire,” which is basically like your Wall on Facebook. People can go to that area and leave messages.
And slated for release in 2009 are yet more features, including: Status updates and photo albums. Sound familiar?
While WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is quick to point out that BuddyPress is not meant to be yet another stand-alone social network in your life, his post about it seems to poke directly at the larger networks like Facebook and MySpace. “I mean all your friends are already on Myspace, but if you wanted to start something new maybe with more control, friendlier terms of service, or just something customized and tweaked to fit exactly into your existing site, then BuddyPress is a great framework to use. Maybe even someday you’ll be able to connect your BuddyPresses to each other and to the existing monolithic social networks,” Mullenweg writes.
That reads a lot like, “hey a lot of people are pissed off by the big social networks terms of service issues, and their set ways of thinking, why not use BuddyPress?” And depending on how well this impressive feature set works, some people just might. It’s also worth noting that in an interview he did with us a couple weeks ago, Mullenweg described BuddyPress as “Facebook-in-a-box.”
But there’s also a catch to BuddyPress for the time being: To install it, you have to be using WordPress MU, the multiple-user variety of the blogging software that is a bit more complicated to set up and is used much less than traditional WordPress. But Mullenweg’s comment that BuddyPress “currently requires” WordPress MU, would seem to indicate that eventually it will roll out to the larger WordPress community as well.
BuddyPress has been in development for over a year, and was originally called “ChickSpeak.” This name is much better.
another solid product from the wp team! congrats!
Looks like the wp team just deflated Facebook’s valuation even more. I hear a giant sucking sound …
Not at all, these services are complementary. Check out the testbp.org demo site, it uses Facebook Connect.
Wow I’m the first to reply.. Ha I love the BuddyPress beta and wanted to use it on my site. I hope the features will work with our heavily modified Wordpress site.
Can’t wait to get it installed.
Social Networking is dead. Creating a profile and getting friends to join your network is has already gotten old. We are in a transition phase of ending social networking and starting a phase possibly something more interactive and engaging than just posting profiles and generating friends.
I can’t agree more mike;
There must a way to build a common framework where you could upload your friend from platform to platform in a way that you connect to one person only once. That is the next challenge of social networking.
Can haz DiSo? http://diso-project.org/
Definitely looking forward to seeing what people can do with these technologies in BuddyPress.
Diso + BuddyPress would be very cool. We would like to use on our BuddyPress based http://www.healthblogs.net
We use it and are loving BP so far…… looking forward to a huge growth in features now that the official release has occurred.
Love BuddyPress….. now only if we had more themes …. Their default theme definitely needs a revamp.
Do people really want to be on tens or hundreds of different social networks? This space needs consolidation, not expansion.
There are easily 2,500 plus social networks not even including Ning… We are already there.
That’s great. I installed mu and the buddypress beta version to play around with and it was great (with a few bugs). Happy to see a more stable version released!
Prediction – in a year or two you will see a one-click buddypress install button in your cpanel…with a gazillion plugins and themes available.
We’re already working with a few hosts to get BuddyPress as a one-click install.
@Matt
That’s great news.
I’m guessing that one of those hosts will be Dreamhost? I hope so.
“It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites.”
That is a really poor way to phrase what Buddypress is.
It doesn’t lay on top of a Wordpress blog it lays on an MU installation, which you do clearly state later in the piece. But MU and a standard Wordpress install are very different animals.
true enough — just trying to make it easy for people to understand. but i’ll clear that up.
I get that. Thanks for making that change. You probably just saved 10000 people going to the wordpress forum going “how do I turn my site into a social network?”
great product, have spend some time with it. very usefull, if the next version could support wordpress “single user”, that’ll be great.
friends will not hire you or pay your bills.
“serious social” is on its way. the future of social is about “strategic social positioning.” aka location. users will forever want to be profiled at the best social site that represents their professional or personal lifestyle. 20 million small businesses out there and there not on myspaz or fadbk or linkedin. wonder why?
NetworkLocator.com – connect yourself
Oh! No Automattic. Twitter hit them hard. 30 million investment going nowhere.
With BuddyPress, they can’t take any piece from Facebook, MySpace or hi5. They may stand against Ning or Grou.ps. Yet they’re too early for that. Checked the RC just a week ago, templates look nice, but the installation is hard, and the features are simply, not there yet. Maybe the next versions will catch up though.
It’s nice to see WP finally taking UI design seriously. I’m not saying this is perfect, but combined with v2.7, it shows that they are moving in the right direction. Previous iterations of WP have been horrible.
Thanks for noticing! Jane Wells and Matt Thomas are the two biggest people to thank for this change.
Well done to Andy and the team. BuddyPress looks great.
I like the idea, hopefully I’ll be able to implement it in a future project.
looks like another impressive addition from automattic.. will install it on the test server
BP is a great solution not for a broad based social network, but for niche communities built by people who share a given passion. It has a huge advantage over Ning (and others like it) in that the webmaster has full control, doesn’t have to share user data and can self monetize (if that’s the plan).
The betas have been great (as betas go) and it’s good to see a stable release. Go BuddyPress!
OpenID needs to be the master of the profiles. If all our ‘friends’ etc were then also updated against this we can have the all elusive ‘following profile’ from app to app.
But really, this type of software is just making Gen Y’ers dumber and dumber by the day. Lazier and Lazier too!
Ok, so when is MU going to be updated to the WP 2.7.x code base?
It already is
http://ocaoimh....rdpress-mu-271/
Beau,
Great, thanks for the heads up!
buddypress is really a wonderful package from wp team one of my friend already using buddypress in their blogs and made some wonderful social networking sites
This is awesome! WordPress is a game-changing platform and it has done much more for the internet than it has been given credit for. Here’s to BuddyPress!
.
Where this really comes into it’s own is for niche sites in industries where the participants don’t social network yet. My audience, mostly male, over 40, wealthy are definitely not social networkers (in the main).
I can see a lot of niche Wordpress blogs which are building communities using this… I’m ceretainly going to give it a go.
I was excited at first yesterday but I’m a little more excited about Google Friend connect. I think it has more promise and is less problems than a full profile on my site. It connects with Yahoo, AIM, Open ID and Gmail. A much better option for us.
Hopefully we’ll see plugins popping up for BuddyPress that will achieve the same thing. There is already a Facebook connect plugin running on http://testbp.org/
Also, there is no reason why Google Friend Connect can’t be plugged into BuddyPress as well.
Checked it out a few days back and it has a lot of features…
Social networking has to emerge in some more meaningful form than what it is currently. Buddy press might help a small group of users from a group . But no reasons why they cannot do on facebook.
I would think of it being a part of a bigger application where users could share some context related information with each other
A couple of reasons: branding, and own your data.
I was planning to start a social network on Ning and then suddenly came upon the BuddyPress 1.0 announcements yesterday. Was super excited until I realized it runs on Wordpress MU.
I have gained substantial experience maintaining and customizing Wordpress blogs but have yet to try out Wordpress MU. Im not sure how different it is than Wordpress and if there are any disadvantages.
Can anyone recommend whether I should go with Ning, BP using MU or wait for the regular Wordpress version?
I’ve been keeping an eye on the BuddyPress development for some time and I really like what I see. I started utilizing MU just over a year ago, but this takes it to a whole new level. I see a huge market for this for niche sites and the power to own your data is key!
Lots of info
Thanks for noticing! Jane Wells and Matt Thomas are the two biggest people to thank for this change
I started utilizing MU just over a year ago, but this takes it to a whole new level.