[lincme.co.uk]

@peterverkooijen; Good points about the focus of a social network being on the member, while a forum is focussed more around the information. I think @alanchrishughes has a point too though, about non-techies being put off by having to register.many people are still terrified that if they enter their name and email address then you’ll have access to their bank account – seriously!

I’ve built a number of sites in Drupal, which is very powerful indeed, and doesn’t suffer so much from update issues. It gives such fine control of everything that it’s amazing, and for those who haven’t tried it, you can basically build your own custom CMS with it. It takes so long to do though. We tried Elgg, which is kinda cool out of the box, and does a lot of social network things really well. However, its interface is naff (in my opinion) and theming is not easy. Worse still, adding extra pages to build a custom site means lots of coding, instead of WP’s simple click-to-add. We’re going to need that for custom background (paying) advert pages, and hopefully a lot of them as time goes on. Also, Elgg has almost no member control, roles, etc., and wile the Elgg team feel that’s not important, we strongly disagree. People do not behave nicely just because they signed up to a social network!

Personally, I see nothing wrong with a social network which allows unregistered users to comment with CAPTCHA, along with well defined and easy to use groups for members to join, and good role management and strong privacy for those who require it. That way, just as in the real world, you can have private places and high streets, with members themselves controlling who does what. For me, at least, that’s all a social network need be.