I think if you look at how many people (including myself) look at a BP site, it actually does seem reasonable to assume that people would conform to the questions and care about the answers. As I see it, rolling your own facebook is nice, but probably not entirely practical or necessary — once a true alternative pops up, there’s usually a standard alternative for a while until the next comes along.
Personally, I feel BP is wonderful for smaller niche communities where that structured social interaction is, in many ways, the selling point. A music site that asks “what are you listening to right now?” a cooking site that asks “what are you cooking right now?” etc. Connecting people along that shared niche interest, I think, provides value.
In some ways, BP already supports this by giving admins the option. I’m thinking specifically with respect to the profile options you have with categories and questions for users. “What’s your favorite song?” or “What’s your favorite food?” would be totally logical there, and I’d love to see (and plan to try to implement one way or another) the same thing for status.
It would be amazing to see it built in for status updates when that rolls out (which I’m hoping is still this summer). The ability to add fields, mark their importance, and even customize the way they render in search results and things would be very, very nice. Sort of like how you template a WP entry and can customize how it displays in various places. I realize all of that is much harder than a simple text area and pulling the most recent data out of the db, but it would add a lot in terms of flexibility for niche networks.
Thanks for the guidance on programming. I’ll figure it out somehow.
(I actually thought wire v. status was semantics too at first, but wire is more like facebook’s wall, where people can post and conversations can be two-way. Status is more personal for users, something larger and untouchable by others.)
so, in thinking about this more, the wire is actually entirely wrong for this. where are the status updates for BuddyPress? THAT’S what would be most effective in adding an additional field to.
I saw they’re on their way as part of the core package, but has anyone built a good plugin yet?
Any thoughts on this? I figure there has to be a simple way to have something like wire2 run right along side of the wire. Any guidance would be helpful.
