Of Social Streams and Circles
Posted by
rhoward
on
March 18 2008
Yesterday the Community Server development team provided me with a review of the current state of Community Server 2008 beta 2, due out soon.
While there a number of exciting new additions in our 2008 release I'm particularly enamored with several specific capabilities. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to write about some of these new features and thought I'd start with social streams and social circles.
Social Stream
If you've used Facebook you've experienced Social Streams first hand. On Facebook it's called a News Feed:
In Community Server 2008 we call this a Social Stream. A social stream is a chronological list of updates and other information about what your friends are doing and it's front-and-center on the new custom landing page for users [1]. Community Server 2008 places a lot of emphasis on people and this is one of the new ways you can track what your friends are doing, what they've written, etc.
There are about 15-20 events that Community Server has built-in. For example: posts on your profile page, new friends, updates by friends, posts by friends, etc. But in addition to the included events you can also add in your own events. One of the samples that we'll hopefully have available is integrating Twitter as an event feed.
Social Circles
Groups or Social Circles are micro-communities within a Community and are designed to allow users with common interests to have their own "area". These groups can be public or private and support invitations - this means you can start a group and invite just your friends to join.
Within a group there are discussions for the group, blogs, and the ability to share files. You can even personalize the look-and-feel of the group much like you would personalize a blog by editing a theme. It even support Widgets that you can add into the sidebar:
You'll see these features and more show up in Community Server 2008, beta 2!
[1] We'll post some screen shots of the new Community Server UI in the coming weeks. The new home page for users is a new addition we're excited to show off!