BuddyPress.org

I’m pretty much good with all of this.

Back to what Mike was saying in response to my woolgathering: I do tend to think that there is a good intersection between traditional forum/thread/comment structure and the kind of social-networky way of (not) organizing things, and that Buddypress is heading in that direction, particularly with the new activity/threadedness stuff.

But traditional forum-like structure, to some degree, is still what most un- or semi-sophisticated users who haven’t grown up with social networking kind of expect, I think. That doesn’t in any way mean that it’s the best way of doing things, though, as you say.

The optimum path, as you suggest, I think is to continue to rethink things a bit (as Andy and everyone else who’s contributed to Buddypress has been doing) so that we can leverage the best of both worlds — the structured, heirarchical, predictable (if hard to search) architecture of the traditional forum along with the interconnected, non-heirarchical, loose-coupled, folksonomical, social, person- and activity-focussed interconnected peopleweb New Way.

Hit that point just right in terms of architecture and UI design, and we’re not just reinventing Facebook or PHPBB or mashing them up, we’re doing something that’s made of awesome and sauce.