definitely a great feature!
Wow. judging from the forum posts; transitions to 1.2 is not smooth.. and many like the changes. cant wait for the next set of changes that will force me to redeploy my site again!
There have been very few posts concerning issues with 1.1-1.2 upgrades. On the whole I think is has gone very well. I think if you use the old theme (“BP Classic”) with the BP Backwards Compatibility plugin you can get the wire back.
What do you find the new activity sections do not do for your site that the wire did?
You cant post on somebody’s activity stream. Well you could @ them and it would show on their @’s same thing just different method
It’s gone from a Facebook “Wall” implementation to something like “Twitter.” You can’t go into my Twitter and leave a message, can you?
Oh facebook got ride of the old wall as well. It’s now more like twitter now. I think people are freaking out by not being able to go an post on the actual persons wall when in reality BP 1.2 has made it even easier by using mentions.
I have an author community with people older than 40 years and they want it as simple as possible. The wire was easier for them than the @ will be. We’re not the twitter-generation 
To be fair, the Twitter and Facebook generation are all of about 3 years apart. If you can’t adapt quickly the internet is not going to be a very fun place for you.
@Modemlooper I have to say that’s a very inconvenient method of posting on someone’s activity stream though. It forces you to browse away from the user profile to be able to post a message into their activity stream. The average user will most likely just think it’s not possible to leave a comment.
A second, more important issue is that this method is inconsistent with the group-, site- and your own user page activity streams because those, contrary to the user page activity stream of a friend, do allow users to post message directly into them. The current implementation takes some elements from twitter and some from regular social network sites and applies them inconsistently. All in all this makes for a very confusing user experience.
I think a lot of these issues would be alleviated if the activity stream on the user page of a friend would have a text area near the top, consistent with those found on the site-, group- and your own user page activity streams. Messages posted through this method would automatically be preceded with an @ mention. This would apply the same user interaction method to all activity streams and yield a much more consistent user experience.
Groups are different, they show the activity for a group. If I post a message in the group it’s activity for that group, so it shows on the group activity stream. That’s why there is a box to post.
If there was a post box on every user’s page, where does that post go? It can’t go on that user’s activity stream because that stream is the activity for that user. If I post, that’s my activity, not theirs. That would be totally confusing.
The activity stream is not the wire. It’s an activity stream, it shows activity for a specific object (user/group). If you want the free-for-all wire functionality then you’ll need to install the back compat plugin, or see if someone is interested in remaking it as a plugin for 1.2.
@Andy But from a usability point of view this is very confusing. Some activity streams do allow you to post into them and some don’t. One method of posting into a user activity stream is allowed (replies) but another (leaving a direct comment) isn’t. From a developer point of view this might feel logical due to the underlying structure, but from a user point of view it’s very confusing. A user is forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to be able to interact with a friend.
I don’t think it would be confusing for the user at all to allow their friends to post into their activity stream. They are, after all, already able to do this by replying to an activity. Allowing users to directly post into their friends activity stream would merely add consistency to the user interaction. It’s precisely how Facebook works and they seem to get along just fine.
On the other hand, the fact that in order to see a comment on your own profile you have to browse to someone else’s profile does feel very confusing, because it all of a sudden injects twitter style functionality into a specific subset of the buddypress user interaction which otherwise is more consistent with how the majority of other social networking sites work.
Andy, in Germany we have the word “Verschlimmbesserung”. It means, that something became complicated by trying to do it better. In my opinion the missing wire is a “Verschlimmbesserung”.
I tried the back compat plugin, but it’s easier to handle without it. So I would be glad if somebody could make a wire-plugin for 1.2.
Mentions is a good solution for this problem already, you could even make a textbox on a profile that automatically adds a mention off the user in front of the text. Could be an easy solution. 
@Xevo You mean something like a ‘mentions stream ‘ on the user page, separate from the user activity stream?
Its the same as it was just go to a persons profile and click the mention this person button then post, that person will be notified.
It really is no different than before. The wall is now called @ Mentions on your profile.
Modemlooper, it isn’t the same. The @-mentions appear in the members-list. So everybody can see what another person said about another.
The postings on the wire only were on the wire an nowhere else.
Yea, it is not the same. I am not sure how to go about using the compatibility plugin, I used it on my other theme, but the wire component was still gone. I say we shouldn’t go completely go after twitter with micro blogging and more after Facebook. If anyone has a better idea on how to revive the wire, please post.
bump, I really want to get this wire.
@modemlooper It’s similar but it’s inconsistent and confusing for users. I have to agree with nickrita that this appears to be a case of ‘Verschlimmbesserung’. It makes it unnecessarily complex to do something as simple as to leave a comment on someone’s profile and continue a conversation from there.
If the user activity stream is really meant to be purely about activities of the user as Andy said, why are we able to leave replies that show up in the user activity stream? If this principle were to be applied consistently, the user should also not be able to post replies into a user activity stream (or at least they should not show up in the user activity stream but instead at the @mention subsection).
As a result of these inconsistencies we have we have this confusing hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. I really like the idea of @mentions as an added feature to the way users can interact, but it shouldn’t be the sole method of (semi-)public user to user interaction. One of the major weaknesses of Twitter (and one of the major reasons Twitter clients are so popular) is that it’s extremely difficult to initiate and keep track of (semi)-public conversations on their website. Just try using twitter.com to hold multiple conversations if you have a group of active friends on there, it’s extremely frustrating and labour intensive. Buddypress doesn’t have the luxury of anything that resembles twitter clients to cover up these kind of limitations that are inherent to the twitter system.
I feel that the current implementation of buddypress leaves these weaknesses of the design of the twitter system intact and even further exacerbates them by inconsistent application.
I therefore plead for a consistent design that allows users to post both messages and replies into a user activity stream regardless of whether it’s the site, group or user activity stream. This would take care of the issue of the missing wire while at the same time providing a consistent user interaction design for the activity streams across a buddypress site.
@motionsw What would you think of a system where a user would be able to leave a message directly on the page of the user at the activity stream, similar to the way Facebook does it (and consistent in design with how you can leave a message on the buddypress group & site activity streams with a textbox near the top)? Whether such a message would then turn up in the group & site activity stream would be handled by privacy settings.
@mentionsw I agree with your opinion that buddypress shouldn’t try to copy the Twitter model for user to user interaction. The Twitter design excels at some forms of user to user interaction but is incredibly awkward and difficult to use for doing something as simple as initiating and holding a conversation.
It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of Twitter users stop tend to quickly stop participating in two-way conversations and instead become passive consumers of updates by a small group of very active twitter users. This is in a large part due to the fact that the twitter system is very unfriendly towards bidirectional user interaction. Even with a Twitter client it can be really easy to loose track of a conversation because @mentions are linked to the user instead of a specific tweet. Facebook and similarly designed services are vastly superior in this regard.
I don’t think buddypress should be copying the Twitter system while at the same time excluding the systems such as Facebook and Myspace which the large majority of people are accustomed with. Instead, the twitter system should be part of a system that gives buddypress users the option of different types of user to user interaction instead of forcing them to use one particular style.
On a side note, I don’t think this has anything to do with a generation gap between Twitter users and Facebook users. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube all have different kinds of qualities that are suited to satisfy specific social needs of their respective users. For some needs people are more likely to use one network and for other needs people are more likely to use another network. Just because the Twitter system is relatively new and currently being hyped doesn’t make it superior to other systems.
@xspringe You are right on, Buddypress should not copy the twitter system. We don’t need another twitter, we want more of a social network such as Facebook, and then we could extend from there. The @mention feature is a great additional feature, how about having a social network centered around Facebook, and then have these cute additions from twitter? Buddypress is very flexible. Besides, who wants another twitter? One is enough.
You guys keep saying it should be more like FB and I think it is like FB. You log into facebook what do you see? An activity stream of your friends status updates. Go to your profile what do you see? A stream of your status updates with the ability to reply to those updates.
You could create your own plugin to make a ‘wire’
