Hi there, I read your post on dev in Drupal and I just wanted to give you a little bit of (hopefully helpful) guidance, regarding which direction to take. On dev / your 5.26.06 posting / it seemed as if you were trying to decide whether to go for developing either...

(1) "social networking" capabilities, a la orkut -- for drupal end users --
(2) or network analysis -- for drupal admins.

Personally, my vote is for polishing up the social network capabilies of drupal for end users, a la orkut.

[In fact, (1) might be a prerequisite for a successful deployment of (2). REasoning: without adequate SN capabilities, there might be little network infrastructure to analyze.]

Anyhow, that's my current interest and bias and in case you've elect to go that route, I've done some investigating of what drupal already has on offer, so could hopefully give you a bit of a head start. There's definitely stuff you can build on, although there's also quite a ways to go.

The principal social networking tool available in Drupal, imho, currently, is Drupal's "buddylist.module" which is supposed to be the rough equivalent of the common "friends" function you find on all the popular SN sites, orkut, myspace, etc.

The module is well written and well documented. So, I would consider building off of it.

However, this module has two significant drawbacks,

(1) First, under its current setup, *buddy relations are not symmetrical*. That is, if A is buddy of B, it does not imply that B is buddy of A. That is, buddylist treats friendship relationships as *directional*, rather than *mutual*. This creates some confusing scenarios -- for example -- under the current setup, you can have the following situation:

"A is buddies with B, but A is not buddies of B, where as B is not buddies with A, but B *is* buddies of A"

Although there might be some very unusual special cases where a unidirectional friend relationship might be useful, this is generally, not the common semantic case.

(2) Second, currently, *buddy relationships may be unilaterally determined*. That is, A can unilaterally decide to declare that he is buddies with B, regardless of B's consent. Again, this is not standard in the common usage of buddy relationships as a social networking tool. Generally, buddy relationships are mutually and *consensually* determined.

There are other more superficial issues regarding the polishing of buddylist, but these two issues strike at the core of it, and should be tackled first, imho.

A solution to these two issues above has been posted as a patch here http://drupal.org/node/11892 -- it is patch that I wrote -- with help from RobRoy -- and functions without a hitch on my site, www.ithou.org . This patch replaces the "asymmetric" / "non-consensual" framework with one that is "symmetric" and "consensual". It is still awaiting review. I imagine that you could assist in that process and help move Drupal and buddylist into a more solid social networking platform.

Should this be of interest to you please do not hesitate to contact me. [I may post this also on drupal-dev, just in case.]

Regards,

Albert
albert [at] ithou.org

Hi,

I think that there's some threshold for most people as to the number of social networking sites they want to be involved in, and how many profiles they want to maintain. As far as I know, MySpace and Facebook are the two biggest in my demographic (25 and under, US). If I had to do a new social network for every drupal powered site, I certainly wouldn't bother. If I used lots of drupal sites and could have a unified, single social network for all of them, I might be interested. If you had an XML Scheme/DTD and some code that let me publish my profile easily to places like Facebook, I probably would try it out.

Hope this helps,

Jacob