Recently in Social Networking Category

About a month ago I was having one of my rants about how I hated Twitter and that it was leading to the downfall of communication and the Internet at large. I realized that in order to pronounce a more thorough judgement I ought to experience it more fully. So despite my professed hatred of the microblogging medium I registered and started to Tweet. In doing so I wanted to consider the margins where I saw potential value for Twitter.

I saw the opportunity for Twitter to be a space that I could pass along some of the notes that I keep meaning to write in this blog, but never seem to have the time to do. The benefit of being constrained by 140 characters (including a bit.ly compressed URL) is that I didn't have to feel like a short note was unworthy, like I had been feeling about any entry on the blog less than 1000 words.

I started to Tweet any time I saw a story about collaborative tools or some of the other areas of my professional interest and I started to follow a small sampling of other folks on Twitter.

A month later I have learned a few things about Twitter and found out how to make it my friend.

First and foremost I learned to ignore anyone who actually answers Twitter's question "What are you doing?" In almost all cases, I don't care to read streams of what people are actually doing. What I care to read is what people are thinking. Others have suggested that the prompt should really be "What is on your mind?" I want to read the Tweets on what ideas people have, articles that they are reading, and interesting things that they have found on the web.

The corollary to the first item is that I don't follow celebrities. I really really couldn't care less about the stream of activities that movie, TV, or sports stars (or more likely their proxies) want to share with the world. This is US Magazine, only more poorly written and without grainy photos of celebrities in sweats.

I quickly stopped following anyone who split posts across multiple Tweets (i.e. anyone who posted a "1/53" post). As noted above, I found that the 140 character limit can actually be a strength in that it makes it comfortable to share short ideas. If you need more than one post to share an idea, than Twitter is the wrong medium. I found this to be especially true of several journalists who would several times a day share ideas split across 5-10 sequential posts. "Get a blog" I say. I chose to write this post in a blog, instead of 243 Tweets. Like any electronic communication medium it is best used when you use it for what it is good at, and communicating complex ideas across split posts is not something it is good at. Don't deliver your resume via SMS and don't deliver complex journalism via Twitter.

I also found that I stopped following anyone with more than 5-10 Tweets a day. This is related to the above set of ideas. If someone is that prolific they should use a different medium or more likely they are giving me too much information.

In thinking about who followed me and who I followed, one realization I came up with is that "Facebook is for friends, Twitter is for colleagues". My list of friends on Facebook has grown over time and I have begun letting colleagues in. But what I post in Facebook is pictures of my family and thoughts relevant to friends and family. It isn't really something that I intend to be consumed by colleagues. On Twitter, in contrast, I post about things related to my professional life. I considered whether the distinction between Tweets and Facebook status updates was totally arbitrary. But in fact they are not. Facebook is about me. It not only has status updates, but pictures, likes/dislikes, etc. It builds up a personal profile. Friends on Facebook are also bidirectional (I am your friend if you are mine). In contrast Twitter just has my ideas, nothing else. And "followers" are unidirectional (by default - I don't follow many people who follow me and vice versa). In this sense it is a broadcast medium that I can use to disseminate information and ideas.

I am still not sure whether Twitter itself will survive, but this format is here to stay. That isn't all bad. It would be great if the signal to noise ratio could increase. While that isn't necessarily the trend, it just may happen on Twitter. The celebrity-obsessed may move on to a different medium and Twitter may evolve to better support real time search. Let's see what Ahston has to say about that.

After deciding to go with Knowledgetree to manage documents, I reconsidered. I started a project using Knowledgetree but wanted more than document management. While checking in and out documents went really well, there wasn't any other way to communicate with team members through the site - notes, messages, calendars, etc. So I fell back on another system that I had been testing - opengoo. Opengoo has been working really well for the small project.

Opengoo opens with a dashboard for each user. The UI has improved since the last beta.

While Opengoo is generically for collaboration, it is quite good at document management. Think somewhere between GoogleDocs and Basecamp. You create different projects within you can also tag different documents and items (instead of using folders). Documents are presented in a list that allow easy access to downloading, checking in and out and viewing (screenshots from beta 1.1).

Each document presents further options, as well as a record of previous versions and related notes. Team members can subscribe to documents for alerts, though right now alerts are only sent on document notes, not check in and out. It is worth noting, however, that the development team has been very responsive to bugs and feature requests in the forums.

Opengoo also allows for live editing of documents within the browser. This includes text documents, and presentations currently with spreadsheets on the way.

The big drawback to date is that uploaded documents and documents created within opengoo are totally separate. You can't edit uploaded documents inline or download new documents as word processing documents. But that is likely to come.

Opengoo also has tasks, blogs, wikis, notes and a calendar. Just about everything you'd need.

Email in is a little limited to a beta component that pops email into a special section. But emailing in notes and documents could come in the future as well.

As much as there are features to wait for, there is enough to use as a serviceable collaboration application right now. Opengoo has been working well on my current project, and when 1.1 final comes out I'm likely to use it even more.

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Another anticipated application surfaced recently as well. Liferay Social Office, a variant of the Liferay portal, came out in beta this week. It is a social collaboration platform billed as a Sharepoint alternative.

When users log in they are presented with a dashboard. It differs from a number of other collaboration platforms by the social components.

As is the focus of Sharepoint, Liferay Social Office has solid document management features.

You have the ability to lock documents, comment on them, update them, and convert formats (when OpenOffice headless is installed correctly). Webdav is also built in, but is somewhat buggy, at least in this beta when tested in Mac OS X and Ubunutu.

But Liferay Social Office has a lot of other features as well. It has wikis and blogs (both of which are somewhat unremarkable but fine). It does have pretty decent forums though.

While I haven't tried it yet, there is the ability to link forums and email lists, which is quite handy. Tasks are missing, but have been requested in the feature list. It is still in beta, with estimated release some time this spring. Worth keeping tabs on.

A while back I wrote about the open source social networking site Elgg. When it came time to choose a new social networking site for my family, I opted not to go with Elgg, since it was going through a major code revision. I went with People Aggregator instead. People Aggregator has been ok, but it is rough in a lot of places, and way overdue for an update (as far as I can tell it has missed the last two or three milestones, as it is still on 1.2pre7). This has kept me on the lookout for a new solution, and the arrival of Elgg 1.0 has me looking hard in that direction.

The new version of Elgg is the best solution for a closed social network that I have seen so far. It was super easy to install - typical PHP/MySQL install that involved setting up a database and uploading files. I did need to manually enter some info in my apache conf since it tried to write an .htaccess file that my apache configuration was set to ignore. But that was easy to spot and within minutes I was up and running.

At first glance it is clean and simple (in the style of the old one) with a bit more AJAX and the nice large sans serif fonts associated with many web 2.0 apps.

I jumped right to my dashboard where I was able to easily edit the widgets that appeared for me on my front page.

Once populated with some content, it dynamically updates the latest activity at a glance.

Before editing too much I went to the administrative console to manage plugins. The new Elgg architecture is plugin (mod) based. It can ship with the bare minimum or a "full" set of plugins. I chose the "full" set, which in fact actually does not include all of the plugins available on the site. I needed to go to the site to get the "walled garden" plugin so that I could make the site available only to those who I wanted it. By default anyone can register. The walled garden essentially takes all information off of the front page and disables the register link. I found this "full" set a little confusing. I don't know why they can't include the walled garden by default, since you can enable/disable plugins from the administrative console if you don't want to use any of them.

Once that was done I went back to creating content. Creating a blog is easy (particularly with the TinyMCE plugin).

Uploading files is also easy. And when I uploaded pictures it recognized them as such and made an album for me.

Even for a closed site it is nice to have multiple groups and separate areas in a social networking site, and Elgg delivers there. You can create groups, with private messaging areas, forums, etc. very easily.

I found a few things a bit confusing in Elgg. Like the fact that friendship can be asymmetric, that is once you friend someone that doesn't mean that you are their friend. That needs to be done separately. Once you have a friend you can send them messages like in most other systems.

I also found the status updating a little confusing. I thought this would be in my profile by default but you need to add it separately as a widget. Then you need to understand that it is editable via nifty AJAX even though it looks static.

Other things that weren't well in Elggville were the access control methods. There were some confusing things about what "private" means in different contexts. And I would occasionally get some errors posting information when the settings weren't allowed.

In the end Elgg is excellent, but I have a few reservations about where it is going. Is it going to be a bare bones social network that you are supposed to build on? What will the commercial Elgg be?

These questions will likely be answered soon, but I think that Elgg is very promising, and I'd probably even choose it now as my number 1 choice for a closed social network.

This week I had an occasion to start up a social networking site for some family. I wanted it to be a closed site where Internet newbies and parents of kids who are participating would feel safe. For those same newbies I wanted it to be easy to use.

I had previously looked at Elgg. But I decided to cross Elgg off my list for two reasons. First, it is transitioning to this part framework/part ready-to-run solution, and right now it isn't really either. Second, I think the "classic" version (which is the existing ready-to-run solution) serves as an educational networking space really well, but as a pure social space it fits less well.

I searched around and found several potential candidates. I narrowed it down to Insoshi, Lovdbyless and PeopleAggregator. There are many other solutions out there, but I wanted something that didn't have pluggable components that needed to be upgraded or any particular advanced tools that I don't think this community will need. I also wanted something that was under active development.

Insoshi and Lovdbyless both run on Ruby on Rails. I've been increasing my expertise in deploying RoR apps, but I'm still relatively new so these both took a while to install. PeopleAggregator is a standard LAMP app and took quite a bit less time to install.


Lovdbyless

Lovdbyless took the longest to install. It required quite a number of Ruby gems, not all of which installed in an entirely straightforward way. The biggest problem was rmagick, which is a Ruby library for ImageMagick. I run CentOS 5, which only has ImageMagick 6.2.x, which is not sufficient for the latest version of rmagick. Luckily I found this post on getting the previous release of rmagick to run. I also needed to install the ImageMagick-devel package for it to compile.

The instructions are pretty detailed for Lovdbyless, but they only get you running under WebBrick, which should be considered for testing purposes. In fact they brush over instructions for running this in any kind of production environment. The lack of details on getting this running under other web servers or in a production environment makes it somewhat frustrating. I got close with my existing knowledge, and I'm sure that a more experienced RoR sysadmin could get it going with Apache/mongrel or Lighttpd, but it shouldn't be that hard.

In the end the application was reasonable but pretty bare bones. Blogs and photos.



The administrator capabilities are limited to deleting users, and there was no way (at least in the GUI) to do anything else such as close or partition the community. In the end, I think that Lovdbyless is intended to be a framework for others to build on.


Insoshi

Insoshi is trying to do just that (build on Lovdbyless). They have developed their own social networking package, but have borrowed some pieces from Lovdbyless. It was a bit easier to install, though I still couldn't get it running just right under anything but WebBrick. Even then I had to jump through some hoops (also true of Lovdbyless) to get it running in production mode. I had to manually start the Ferret search server.

Insoshi shows a lot of promise. It has a good community for its age (which seems to be numbered in weeks or months). But it is even more of a bare bones app than Lovdbyless.




PeopleAggregator I'm still trying to get a handle on the story of PeopleAggregator by Broadband Mechanics, but it is LAMP app with a reasonable (though still not great) community that seems to support it. I found a wiki and some discussion threads for a few of the problems that I had during configuration.

Unlike the RoR apps, it got rolling pretty quickly. I did need one extra domxml php package that was available via yum, and in order for it to spawn extra subdomains (or sub-subdomains in my case) I needed a little DNS magic, but all of that was pretty well explained in the setup section.

PeopleAggregator has a much more robust set of tools. You create different networks (subdomains) that can be made private. Within those you can also create groups . Individual users can create posts of several types (blog, audio, video, photo) and with a simple checkbox they'll appear on the network's home page.



There is a pretty extensive configuration section, but some configurations need to be made in the local_settings file on the server. It would be nice if there were an admin account that configured all of those settings, but I couldn't find it. It did, however, make the first user I created have special configuration powers, but it still couldn't touch all of the settings that could be made by hand.

After some tweaking I was able to make a network private, and in fact I was able to make all networks private by editing some things by hand. That doesn't prevent people from creating accounts on the server, but they can't join any networks. It is notable that PeopleAggregator accepts IDs from other sources (Yahoo etc.) and it also will read status from Facebook, AIM and a few others.

It isn't perfect. But it is pretty good, and I like the ability to svn update to bring in any patches rather than having to download, and transfer settings. For now this is my choice. I'll see what the rest of the people say.

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Redmine Revisited

I've briefly reviewed Redmine before. But I saw that they updated to a new version recently and in my search for a project management package that spanned technical and non-technical users I thought I'd give it another spin. It is another RoR app. But this one has quite good documentation on getting it installed and running under a number of different servers. That combined with my past experience had me up and running pretty quickly.

Redmine offers a nice suite of tools in a not too complicated package. With the improvements in this new version the usability is quite good. The one thing that I struggled with was integrating SVN. I just couldn't get it to connect. I posted in the Redmine forums (which use Redmine, which is a good sign) and had some suggestions, but nothing worked. But then another user in the forums solved it. With the SVN integration, the package really stands out. News to the front page of a project includes SVN updates and checkin comments, which is great.

The rest of the tools (Wiki, Files, News, Documents and the Forums mentioned above and shown below) are also pretty good.



There are better wikis and I miss being able to submit tickets by email (though there was word of this appearing in the next release). But it is above the minimum in just about every category that I'm looking for and could replace several apps (Wiki, Ticket Manager, SVN viewer, News) in one fell swoop.

Shortly after I posted about IceCore, I noticed that there was a VMWare image available on their website. That was the easiest way to get going with IceCore, so I fired it up on VMWare Fusion on my Mac. I did have some problems connecting at first. It turned out that the image was only listening to eth0 and my connection was being detected on eth1. I went to edit the network settings, but alas my favorite editor (nano) was not in the image. I limped through vi, and got the settings to work, and poof there was IceCore.

In terms of features, I think IceCore has the perfect (and I do mean perfect) mix. It is easy to create new groups ("Teams") of users to work on projects, and then provide them with a common set of tools that includes Blogs, Calendar, Discussion, Files, Milestones, Surveys, Tasks and a Wiki. This is great combination of tools



There is tons of ajaxy responsiveness in IceCore (note that the proprietary version goes by "Novel Teaming"). But the UI design needs some work. Threaded discussion take up a lot more space than they need to, and some of the features and layout will not be obvious to novice users.

These shortcomings sent me in search of related projects, when I found Liferay. At first, I couldn't tell the difference between Liferay and IceCore, but then Liferay did an update to version 5.0 and I was able to tell them apart. It turns out that IceCore is built on (the earlier version) of Liferay. Both have a similar portal display that allows you to add lots of widgets (both internal "portlets" as well as external sites and google gadgets).



It does add quite a number of features that facilitate working in teams, but much of the underlying functionality remains. There are numerous bundles of Liferay available, and I chose a bundle with Tomcat 5, which simply required me to run a start script. This uses hsqldb (which is fine for testing) and also installed a lot of sample data (which users on the forums have told me how to get rid of if I choose to continue with Liferay).

The new release of Liferay (which I assume IceCore will eventually incorporate) makes some welcome changes. For example, this is how threaded discussions appear in Liferay 5.



While this is how it appears in IceCore



Notice the popup frame that I'm sure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it isn't how much discussion forums work. New users like to have familiar functionality.

Similarly, this is how you see Wikis in Liferay.



And this is how you edit them.



These are pretty straightforward. But IceCore adds additional complexity with a Wiki that takes up more space, multiple views that are confusing and popup frames.



But where IceCore shines is in having all of the functionality that is needed in a one step install. Liferay is missing tasks most importantly. These could probably be added with a portlet, though I couldn't find one that was free and easy to integrate. IceCore also makes it really easy to manage teams. Liferay has similar functionality in Communities, but the Teams, along with the spaces that get created for them, are easier from an admin perspective.

I've seen some new UI designs for IceCore in their forums, and if they follow through on those and then build on the new Liferay, I think they'll have a real winner. Still, at this point in time IceCore is one of the best products I've seen. Speaking of which Chronopolys has gone 1.0 final and now includes an easy installer. I've also started looking at the community edition of Alfresco which has some new collaboration features in there. I'll try that next (after I can get it to install - it has been fighting with Liferay).

With all the rage around social networking for fun and business, I often have the opportunity to discuss ideas for integrating social networking into collaborative projects. I have heard about Elgg, an open source social networking package that integrates with a number of other packages, and typically recommended it to those exploring social networking applications. But I have never tried Elgg myself.

This week I've been exploring the possibility of putting together an educational social networking application myself, so I took the plunge and installed Elgg. Installation was fairly easy (typical mysql/php install), with the exception of one required modification that was a bit obscure. The installation instructions recommend modifying the .htaccess file to up the available PHP memory. Since I already had 64M allocation in my php.ini file, I ignored those instructions. It turns out this resulted in a blank page when I tried to access the Elgg site, which was eventually fixed by adding the memory allocation back into the .htaccess file.

When all was set, Elgg fired right up with a clean interface.



It is easy to create a profile and add resources such as a blog.



And sharing files (which it confirms you have "legal rights" to) is also a central element of Elgg. This makes it useful for sharing files created by the community.



There are a number of add on modules, either to integrate into Elgg or to connect with Elgg. I tried a couple that seemed centrally useful to creating an Elgg community. First it was Vanilla Forums. It was pretty easy to integrate simply by uploading the module in the appropriate directory (though it had been checked out from SVN or CVS and contained extraneous files).



Finally it was the Portfolio module. This adds the ability to create Wikis that can be shared across teams, or Portfolios that can be used by individuals. I thought the Wikis would be useful for teams working on projects together. The Wikis are rather simple (just really like the blogs organized in a different way).



First experience seems to show that Elgg could be a solid basis for a community. It certainly has idiosyncrasies (e.g. search functions don't search the modules), but the community is active and it shows a lot of promise.