BuddyPress.org

I would tend to agree with modemloopers take on the Activity Stream and of r-a-y’s notion of the Facebook/Twitter issue

I am presently quite concerned with the way that the activity stream might be shapping our communities general activity or possibly simply confusing users. Initially I saw the activity stream as an extremely necessary feature that had to exist in it’s site wide guise on the main page, acting as a beacon of the sites hive of activity, I wanted it apparent that there was ‘Activity’ on the site, but now my concern is that it simply acts to stall users from actually clicking through into the site, of visiting groups, making forum entries etc and in that respect feel that I’m in agreement in stripping out the Sitewide Activity Stream.

As for BP aping Facebook and Twitter in respect of conventions this is something I feel concerned by, I do tend to see why yet would rather it didn’t and attempted to conceive it’s own conventions which I think was partly my thinking in running this thread to explore these issues i.e are twitter like activity streams what are really required do they matter in respect of a communities cohesion? ‘Updates’? very often the question that springs to my mind is “Updates to what?” and I am aware that some users do find Updates confusing.

While I do agree that one aspect of what we do as site developers is to shape our particular site community vis a vis it’s features I do think that this shouldn’t simply mean that BP throws everything into the pot sits back and says “there you are, we’ve provided a little of everything up to you to make sense of it now” On the other hand that is what I tend to enjoy doing but perhaps this is less about us as developers that have the ability and knowledge to hack away and more about BP itself and how non developers (who will comprise – ultimately – the greater group requiring BP to work out of the box without undue hacking)

I think that a discussion/thoughts about two central concerns might be appropriate and to that end – at the risk of trying to mold this general thread too much?- am posting a sub topic to perhaps try and establish some consensus on general principles (if it’s just muddling up the main thread, happy to hear so and a Mod can pull it?)