[Andrew Fielden]

For me BP is most useful where there is a specific need for either privacy or specific features that are not available directly with services like FB or G+.

We use BP for document sharing and creating groups based around discussion of those documents and BP works very well. I am not sure what your use case is but I would suggest that you look at what it is you want the users to do that they cannot with social networks. You have already identified that users stick with what they are used to so it may be that BP is not for you.

[Andrew Fielden]

I have long thought that the breaking down of silos such as Facebook and Twitter to a more distrubuted system would make sense although they do form an easy entry and an openly(?) available area that can be used for public messaging.

My solution is to have an intermediary that can be configured to allow messages to be passed through to other systems according to a security setting that can be applied at admin or user level as required. Additionaly I thought that a similar configuration could be used for discovery of users – e.g. you could set yourself up as only available on your server, someone else might want to be available to a group and yet someone else would be publicly available.

In such a setup your users would only need to sign on once – to the server that they belong and would then be able to see any other user that is a trusted server in the group. In your case the security issues would be minor as you are on the same host although I can see that there may be a need to encrypt transmissions if it were open net traffic.

I am working on this now although don’t have anything to show you yet – will be more than happy to do so when there is a version for testing if you want

[Andrew Fielden]

I first of all want to say that I support Erwin all the way in what he is saying as I know that the effort involved in getting a piece of decent code out there is huge and doing it all for free is a big ask. This is especially so when such code could quite happily be used in commercial organisations who most definitely will charge for the services that they provide.

It seems to me that the eco-system surrounding a product like WP/BP is one that we are still coming to grips with but in essence it seems that there is a move to basic functionality/service for free and that additional usage/features will attract a fee. According to the Mashable review of the recent talk by WP Founder Matt Mullenweg this is how Automattic supports its operations.

So why should a plugin developer not expect the same? Perhaps the future of such development should be along the lines of groups of coders providing a freemium type service so that there is a basic level of functionality and you pay for the extras.

[Andrew Fielden]

I had a quick look at the API for GoogleDocs and I think that Andy Peatling’s suggestion of tracking the documents in the activity stream is a good one as there is a revisions method.

[Andrew Fielden]

I am up for something like this as I think that it could be a vital way to give the control back to the users rather than the Silo owners. There are some other initiatives out there which could be linked into this.

I am in the process of writing up something about this very type of subject and I will post a link to it as soon as possible

[Andrew Fielden]

I had the same issue and then found a post on here that said that I needed to go to Settings->General

There is a check box on that page that called Membership. Check it and update then you will see the register link appear