[buddypress-dev] Portable friends

[Cass Edwards]

From: Cassandra Edwards <wildilocks at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:21 AM
Subject: Re: [buddypress-dev] Portable friends
To: buddypress-dev at lists.automattic.com

Hmmm. To expand a little on what Andrea has said about LJ -

The LJ friends system is far more customisable than any other SN I am aware
of, but it works on a backbone of RSS, which makes it wonderfully portable.
You have complete control as a user over the different levels of security
both for what other people see [on the authoring site as well as through
feed readers with auth=digest], and what you read. The friends list on-site
functions as both an RSS reader as well as a security filter for outgoing
data. Users can define any number of security levels too - your basic
"friends-only" filter is a default, and includes everyone on your friends
list, but you can create new filters and choose which users are included -
this works well for posts about specific interests, geographically located
groups etc. You can make a filter which includes only one person other than
yourself if you want, making it like a private messaging system, as comment
discussions in such groups take the place of email. There is also a default
"private" option, like WP has. You can also add communities and public RSS
feeds to your friends list, making it a very good base to view most of the
content you want to see online: SN+RSS=WIN!

Having expounded upon its complexity, I really don't think it would be too
hard to implement something similar[+improved] using a different codebase
[LJ is written in Perl]- while LJ has added many features over the years,
friends filters have been around for a very long time, and are implemented
on a new account with only basic default options - but getting that
groundwork done right the first time I think would save a lot of work if
people are interested in having these features later down the track. It can
be kept pretty easy for new users to understand, but has the options for
advanced users too.

I have seen people attempting to achieve a similar effect on WP by using the
"Role Manager" plugin, but the functionality is very limited as it only
deals with one side of the equation ie doesn't include an aggregated viewing
function. The other main problem is that users can't be placed into more
than one group - so if you're trying to organise friends-only readers on
your WP blog, currently it's all or nothing.. similar to myspace, and you
have similar issues with sites like Flickr, where people can be classified
as either friends AND/OR family - horribly suboptimal, and feels draconian
if one is used to the LJ system. I want some people to be classified as
"people who share my pathological interest in photographs of bottle caps"
dammit! I could also compare it to the difference between Gmail's labels,
and a traditional email file system - and I can't imagine going back to an
email system that doesn't include labels.

I think it would be a terrible shame for the BP developers to not at least
look at the LJ system to see the simplicity, but also great power, of
user-customisable security settings for the friends feature at the very base
level of functionality.

Cass


On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:02 AM, Chris Taylor - stillbreathing.co.uk <
chris at stillbreathing.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 3:57 PM, Andrea wrote:
> > This does sound way better than checking to see if there's been an
> update
> > first. From a user perspective, I love the lj-like friends feature.
> Users
> > also want control and a sense of privacy. From an MU admin perspective,
> I'd
> > like to see the focus on network-wide first and then maybe add from
> outside
> > systems later.
>
> I've never used LJ - what friends features does it have?
>
> I think we're definitely going to look at local friends first, but it
> may be possible to do it in such a way that makes global friend
> networks easier to do. Privacy options will also be baked in as early
> as possible, as it's an important area.
>
> Chris
> _______________________________________________
> buddypress-dev mailing list
> buddypress-dev at lists.automattic.com
> http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/buddypress-dev
>
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