As you probably know, we’ve been planning to spin off various boards.ie services (blogs, albums, events, friends functionality) into a separate social networking site for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, time and effort have been against us, but I’ve started on this again and hopefully we can launch a beta version within the next few weeks.
The result will be called social.ie (pronounced “socially” :-)). It will leverage our existing boards.ie userbase and the social network connections that have been formed on the site since I added friends functionality three years ago (so far, there are 15335 links between users, 6347 of those are reciprocated). The screenshot below shows the buddylist functionality in vBDrupal that has been hacked a little to be a bit more graphical.
Will post more as it happens…
Two things spring to mind …
1 - Will you be doing this on the existing hardware that’s obviously under pressure?
2 - Will you allow people to opt out? Quite a few people weren’t overly impressed with their data being made available on adverts.ie which they never signed up for.
Michele
1 - It will be running on some existing and some underutilised hardware. The site will eventually be distributed across our five web nodes.
2 - I think it is very important to have an opt out, but also important to have a single sign-on to avoid having multiple accounts / passwords. I haven’t heard from one person who was unhappy with data being made available on adverts.ie.
John
A few people mentioned it to me and I *think* I saw a couple of posts about it, though I honestly can’t remember where.
Michele