BuddyPress: Social networking from your very own blog

Post Highlights

• Set-up your very own social network in your site
• Keep readers on your site for longer
• Increase your blog community and engage with them
• Communicate with the entire WordPress user-base, plus invite friends from all other social networks
  

A few days ago, WordPress decided to plunge into the world of social networking by launching BuddyPress, a Facebook-style plugin that can be installed on top of WordPress.

The new open source platform allows bloggers to build social networks around WordPress sites, whose user-base nowadays scales to millions of users, who can make blogs (personal and corporate) more interactive while engaging better with readers.

Although it’s still in a 1.0 phase, BuddyPress offers many interesting features which are good to hold users down while new features such as status updates and photo albums get rolled out in the near future.

The 1.0 version comes with a series of independent plugins all of which can be downloaded to fit your requirements. These include: extended profiles, private messaging, friends, groups, forums, blog tracking, activity streams and ‘the wire’ (which is basically WP’s version of the Facebook Wall).

From a business perspective, I believe BuddyPress could easily work as a corporate social network platform since you can interact with multiple niche blogs or enterprises who share the same passions, engage actively with your readers as well as create a customizable interface that fits the style of your existing site thus preserving your corporate image.

Matt Mullenweg makes very clear that the idea behind BuddyPress is not “something you use instead of your existing social networks” but instead it’s complimentary and maybe even useful and easier to keep track of readers, get information to them and bring them closer together.

BuddyPress is still at an early stage as I mentioned before so you can only get it via WordPressMU, which seems to be a bit more complicated to manage. Let’s keep an eye on WP for future advancements, hopefully.

Also, you can log in to BuddyPress by using your Facebook and Twitter ids. There’s also a Twitter plugin that allows your tweets to show up on your personal ‘wire’ and an ‘invite friends’ third-party plugin that enables you to invite your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook etc.

Give us a heads up if you are able to find out if the regular WP version will be launched anytime soon!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.