Web community platform

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26 Mar 2008

Chris Pirillo outlines some thoughts on a web community platform

I don’t want a social network, I want a socially RELEVANT network (both on-site and beyond). I don’t want a community platform, I want a participation platform where members are rewarded and ranked appropriately. I don’t want a place where people can just blog, because I’m going well beyond the blog. It’s not just about hosting videos, audio files, or any piece of random media - it’s the discovery mechanisms between them that make them more relevant.

It’s discovery - no matter the community, no matter the type of content. Imagine coming to a site and not just reading about what other people are interested in, but what interests they SHARE with you! Imagine coming to a site and seeing how someone ranks in answers pertaining to your own questions! Oh, I’m confident you may have seen these features elsewhere - but what about for your own site, what about for your own community, what about for your own ideas?

He goes on to put together some ideas for how it all could work, what features he’d like to see, and how they should fit together.

It’s not just dreams and wishes, though. I’ve been working with Chris the last few months to actually build it. Yes, I’m still doing IMified, too. And SacStarts. Who needs free time? Or sleep?

We’re building a platform on Drupal, weaving together the themes, modules, and custom code required for a fantastic out of the box experience in a community publishing platform. We aim for a system that a web site can install and be up and running with a usable platform in no time at all. As Chris explains,

SEO’ed URLs, nimble templates that adhere to a guideline for communities (colors and layout), identity flow, rating, voting, posting, gathering, embedding… a structure that supports both ad hoc and category-driven content… something that is centered on the user instead of the community s/he is involved in

We’ve already got a lot of code written and have released the first Drupal module out of the project, Activity Stream, a modular system that aggregates your lifestream from what you contribute at other sites (Del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, blog entries, etc).

We’re getting some great community involvement, too. Since announcing the project this morning, several individuals and companies have jumped on board, including Rain City’s Boris Mann and Warner Bros Records.

Want to get involved? We’ve got an Assembla space up and we’re on IRC—#drupalcpp on freenode.

Jeremy
March 27, 2008 12:42 PM

Why not MT? They already have action streams

Adam Kalsey
March 27, 2008 3:13 PM

Why not X? Because we picked Drupal. Everybody already has some piece or two of this. But Drupal was judged to be the best starting point for this project.

Scott Koegler
March 28, 2008 10:53 AM

YES!!! I've been pulling my hair out on exactly this issue over the last month. I use Joomla! for publishing but it's hardly a social beast, but great for controlled publishing. Also looked at some of the new breed of community sites (ning.com, kickapps.com) but they dont have the publishing/ control component. I'm in, at least for as much as I can be. That means mostly ideas and review.

Ryan Dempsey
March 28, 2008 12:05 PM

This is great, I'd like to help out any way I can. When I first got into building community sites with CMS's this is exactly what I was looking for. I often wondered why it wasn't done yet. Oh there was a lot of talk about but very little action. Let's do this!

This discussion has been closed.

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