BuddyPress.org

With BuddyPress being used now by/for different interest groups from colleges to niche organizations to purely social networking, etc. there is no doubt that there would be different opinions regarding importance of the friends component vis-a-vis groups component.

I’m surprised in the first place that the friends component could even be considered for deprecation since that’s a popular feature. How about a switch to enable or disable the friends component? In one install, e.g. for a professional organization, they don’t need “friends” and prefer “groups.” In another install, for a social club, they’d like “friends” and “groups.”

It would be great if we see categorization of friends (as Bowe mentioned above) as it makes a lot of sense and extend it so that you could send a message only to Friends-Family or send a message only to Friends-CollegeBuds.

However, should the friends component be deprecated, I would request devs to expand Groups component with a user function to have the ability to privately categorize the people within a Group he/she belongs. e.g. Group-Hiking-Friends, Group-Hiking-Pros, Group-Hiking-CollegeBuds, Group-Hiking-NeedsMoreTraining.

20,000-foot thought here, but possibly germane.

I’ve been thinking as I’ve gotten from ankles- to knees- to nipples-deep in Buddypress is that there may be a little fuzziness conceptually (or perhaps it’s just my own lack of understanding and need to hammer things down, mentally) around some stuff at the highest level as BP has evolved.

What I mean is something like this: forums and groups seem commingled in a way that is pretty darned counterintuitive, I think, for most users accustomed to traditional forums structure or to social networky ways of doing things. This is not entirely to the bad — I’m not suggesting that — but I think it confuses people who are not ‘techy’. This initial confuzzlement means a lot of people give up without trying to figure out the Buddypress Way, which is a Bad Thing. For my part, as someone who’s highly technical and been working on and off in designing user experience stuff for decades, even me, if a site doesn’t present its ‘expected’ interaction mode after a few seconds, I’ll probably give up and go elsewhere. Little things like a lack of an easily found search box will have me closing a site tab, my patience level is so low — I think that ordinary users tend to be a little lost in the groups/forums melange of Buddypress, sensible as it may seem to those of us who are building the sites, and just give up and go back their Facespaces and Mybooks.

Part of the issue I’m describing badly probably comes from the bolt-on and eventually plugged-in nature of BBpress as part of Buddypress, but I also think it might have been a bit of a result of not starting from top down, boring old use-casey thinking. I could be wrong there, of course, it could just be me, and no offense to Andy or anyone else meant by saying it. It just seems a little… wrong to me, a bit, thinking as a user.

So, finally, about this latest idea and thread: there seems to me, as part of the shift in 1.3, to be a changing conceptual focus. That is, we are directing the focus of users from other individuals, other users on the site (as ‘objects’), to the activity of those individuals, as the engine of interaction, if you will. ‘Following’ activity and so on. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, and I actually feel it’s a very good idea, because engaging users and keeping them actively using a site and interacting with others is what it’s all about, and Facebook, like it or love it, understands that perfectly.

But there are downstream consequences of activity (actions) being the focus of site use as opposed to, for lack of a better word, objects (people, groups).

I’d just like to hold up a hand and say that considering what those consequences might be is a wise thing, I think, if only to avoid a kind of frankenstein’s monster situation, with different conceptual drivers for user engagement ruling over different parts of the app, and further stirring up cognitive dissonance in already-possibly-bewildered users.

OK, that’s enough words now.

@mike

I agree with both you and stwc. I think you are both correct. It all comes down to the audience and who you are developing the site for. In my limited experience of exposing BP to uninitiated and/or Average Joe type users, the 1.1 branch’s default theme is not very “dummy proof,” and at times downright confusing. It will be interesting to see how the 1.2 default theme does in the real world.

Modeling real world social interactions which are very organic and three dimensional in a software application which is by nature “flat” is not easy, and probably impossible to get perfect. This is why I am always advocating a flexible API type of approach, over a rigid feature set type of approach. Developers need the freedom to tune the app to their audience, because no two sites will have the same requirements. I am not talking just about the interface, I am also talking about how the app behaves and responds to differing requirements.

@stwc

I agree with you on the Group-Forums being a bit confusing, for techies and even more so for non-techies.

Any suggestions / ideas of how to improve this ?

@Peter a lot of social networks could benefit from a forum for a more centralized discussion, especially larger sites.. Forums should not be the main focus but certainly not forgotten or “dropped”. Especially since it works pretty well and intuitive after you’ve grasped the concept of the group/forum connection.

TLDR version: Introduce types of groups. e.g. “User group” type – it has no forum, no “Home” page, just members listing and activity stream. This group added to Activity Stream filters where relevant.

Would have to filter out custom group type “User group” out of the /groups/directory page & member profile group page.

These custom group types could be set so they are publicly visible/private to those members involved/or hidden (visible to the creator only). As per current Group privacy settings.

Could add e.g. “Friends”, “Colleagues” and “Fans” as default, empty groups for each user on user registration. Obviously revise theme to make the “Friends” page (“Connections”, maybe) look like the Friends page rather than a regular Group.

Different users might create “User group” types with the same name but with different meaning (“Fans” could be interpreted several ways for example). This is no problem as such categorisation is defined — and belongs to — the user who does it. Might need some semantic group kind/type identifier in the code to allow FOAF/SIOC RDF profiles to be able to assigned to these “User groups”.

Last post from me on this thread, just for the record and to summarize, I support John James Jacoby’s vision 100%.

Restructering friending around groups and microblogging/activity stream is a next step in where social web is going. Groups would become extremely useful for all kinds of use cases. It would really set Buddypress apart.

Buddypress can’t be all things to all people imho. Development should focus on a conceptually coherent core, with APIs that make it easy to plug in other more linear functionality, like classic friending and forums.

Do we need to re-invent the wheel ?

Buddypress shouldn’t just copy Facebook – apart from perhaps the registration process… BP has the opportunity to do things different, better, move things forward.

Thanks for further explaining yourself JJJ, and I like the general concept behind a lot.. But the idea that speaks to me the most is making BuddyPress in general more flexible and not “hook” into the group API but make a new one based on that which can not only be used for groups but also for users (and thus friends options).

The idea to make a general API which can be hooked in by the Core components and 3rd Party plugins seems to me the best solution. If you take the group API for example and use it’s functions for individual users:

– Add extra signup pages/fields

– Add new pages

– Add new navigational items etc

All these things are possible with the Group API but take lots of work with a regular profile. Like MrMaz said you could break these functions into smaller parts which can be called upon and extended upon for Groups, Users, Friends and the Activity stream.

The amount of possibilities for new plugins would be endless Once again I’m no programmer and this is coming from as a site admin/BP enthousiast/”Copy and Paste and pray to god I don’t get a white screen of death” kinda guy..

edit: I would also like to say that Mike perfectly summorized my exact ideas of what a group should be and what a group of friends means. Well spoken. I’m getting a Deja Vu here lol

Let me concretize what I’m getting at a bit — I just had a sudden thought.

Taking what is probably the largest active Buddypress install — this one right here — as a test case, I just realized that I don’t really use any of the Buddypress social-networky stuff here (realizing it’s an oldish version of Buddypress and a unique case in some ways), other than the occasional personal message functionality. I don’t look at Groups or anything else, much: every time I visit, I head straight here, to the forum, which isn’t really all that featureful when it comes to forum implementations, but still does the job admirably.

I’m not sure if the way I use this site reflects the way that most people do, but that’s my experience. Sure, I’m an old fart, and am more interested in finding and sharing useful information than I am in just hanging out and socializing, to some extent, and that’s the major part of why this install of Buddypress exists, but hopefully you see my point.

I have a feeling that traditional, threaded forum structure might be an important centerpiece, as it is here, for many sites that will use Buddypress, if, of course, not all of them.

Nothing we’re talking about — and I admit this is getting a little off-topic, but it’s germane, I think — is going to destroy that. I’m just raising it as a consideration in moving forward.

Maximum flexibility, as Bowe and JJJ and others talk about above, is probably always the best thing to aim for.

Friends should be able to be called other names like: contacts if its a business networking site like I did with mine, partners if it is a closed partership intranet for a lawfirm or accounting fir, students, collegues, etc. there should be an option wher you put something or frieds is default. Groups is groups, but the additional functionality to add is very poor, group wiki does not assing a default wiki theme, group blog does not assign a default blog theme, etc Admins sgould be able to choose the default theme for these addons…