Social Networking on Elgg Platform

Introduction

Covers the basics of social networking, runs over some popular social networks and goes through some of the features that are essential to online social networking. It introduces Elgg, and highlights some of the benefits of deploying one's own social network.Ever been to a night club on a Monday morning? There's you, there are the chairs,and the potential to host a party on the weekend. If you've been through Appendix A, your Elgg installation looks pretty much like an empty night club. There are lots of buttons, lots of potential, but no member except you.

But unlike a night club, you don't have to wait for the weekend to host your friends on Elgg. Invite them as soon as you're done setting up the software. Elgg is designed to make it easier for you to invite people. If you've ever setup a blog or rolled your own website, how long did it take before you could invite your friends over? You had to put up all sorts of content to indulge them, and also fiddle around decorating the portal so that it doesn't look dull.

That's where a social network is different from a regular website. The websites follow a two-way, one-to-many style of interaction, where the owner of the website, or blog, talks to all his visitors who respond with their comments, either on the website, or via e-mail. On the other hand, social networking software follows a many-to-many style of interaction. Members interact with each other, and create their own content, which is then shared with all. This is then discussed and commented on by everyone.

The owner of the site is like the perfect host. They mingle, discuss with everyone, but don't stamp their authority, unless you're naughty. They're like every other member, except for the fact that they own the place. Sounds familiar?

So, you don't have to worry about content before inviting your friends. Your friends bring their own content.

What you'll need

Connecting to Friends and Users I hope you're convinced how important friends are to a social network. Initially, you'll have to manually invite your friends over to join. I say initially, because membership on a social network is viral. Once your friends are registered members of your network, they can also bring in their own friends. This means that soon your friends would have invited their own friends as well. Chances are that you might not know these friends of your friends. So, Elgg not only allows you to invite friends from outside, but also connect with users already on the network. Let's understand these situations in real-life terms. You invite your friends over to a party with you at your new Star Trek theme club. That's what you'll do with Elgg, initially. So your friends like the place and next time around they bring in more friends from work. These friends of friends from work, talk about your place with their friends and so on, until you're hosting a bunch of people in the club that you haven't ever met in your life. You overhear some people discussing Geordi La Forge, your favorite character from the show. You invite them over for drinks. That's connecting with users already on the network.

So let's head on over to Elgg and invite some friends! Inviting Friends to Join There are two ways of inviting users to join your network. Either send them an email with a link to join the website, or let Elgg handle sending them emails.

If you send them emails, you can include a direct link to the registration page. This link is also on the front page of your network, which every visitor will see. It asks visitors to register an account if they like what's on the network. The procedure for registering using this mechanism has already been covered in Chapter 2.

Let Elgg Handle Registration This is the most popular method of inviting users to join the network. It's accessible not only to you, but also to your friends once they've registered with the network. To allow Elgg to send emails on your behalf, you'll have to be logged into Elgg. This is covered as part of installation in Appendix A. Once you login, click on the Your Network button on the top navigation bar. This will take you to a page, which links to tools that'll help you connect with others. The last link in this bar (Invite a Friend) does exactly what it says.When you click on this link, it'll explain to you some benefits of inviting friends over.The page has three fields: Their name: Enter the name of the friend you're sending the invitation to.

Their email address: Very important. This is the address to where the invitation is sent. An optional message: Elgg sends an email composed using a template. If you want to add a personal message to Elgg's email, you can do so here. In the email, which Elgg sends on behalf of the network's administrator, that means you, it displays the optional message (if you've sent one), along with a link to the registration page. The invitation is valid for seven days, after which the registration link in the email isn't valid.

Steps

Each tab has a Save your profile button at the end. When you press this button, Elgg updates your profile instantaneously. You can fill in as much detail as you want, and keep coming back to edit your profile and append new information. Let's look at the various tabs: Basic details: Although filling information in any tab is optional, I'd advise you to fill in all details in this tab. This will make it easy, for you to find others, and for others to find you. The tab basically asks you to introduce yourself, list your interests, your likes, your dislikes, your goals in life, and your main skills. Location: This tab requests information that'll help members reach you physically. Fill in your street address, town, state, postal code, and country. Contact: Do you want members to contact you outside your Elgg network? This tab requests both physical as well as electronic means which members can use to get in touch with you. Physical details include your work, home, and mobile telephone number. Electronic details include your email address, your personal and official websites. Elgg can also list information to help users connect to you on instant messenger. It supports ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, and Jabber.

Employment: List your occupation, the industry and company you work in, your job title and description. Elgg also lets you list your career goals and suggests you do so to "let colleagues and potential employers know what you'd like to get out of your career.". Education: Here you can specify your level of education, and which high school, university or college you attended, and the degree you hold. A s you can clearly see, Elgg's profiling options are very diverse and detailed. Rather than serve the sole purpose of describing you to the visitors, the profile also helps you find new friends as well, as we'll see later in this chapter.

Alternate methods

No Alternate methods Yet... What is FOAF? While filling the profile, you must have noticed an Upload a FOAF file area down at the bottom of all tabs. FOAF or Friend of a Friend is a project (http://www.foaf-project.org/) to help create "machine-readable pages that describe people, the links between them and the things they create and do". The FOAF file includes lots of details about you, and if you have already created a FOAF profile, Elgg can use that to pick out information describing you from in there. You can modify the information once it's imported into Elgg, if you feel the need to do so. The FOAF-a-Matic tool (http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.en.html) is a simple Web-based program you can use to create a FOAF profile.

Suggested readings

As the profi le lists several vital and sensitive pieces of information, privacy concerns have been addressed in this chapter. We've seen the various built-in options that Elgg provides, as well as the mechanism to create our own custom groups. Then, we've covered how one can connect with other users on the network. Again, privacy concerns have been addressed, followed by a discussion about moderating friendship requests. We also ran through Elgg's built-in mechanisms for attracting visitors to join the network, and various account settings that a user can alter. After reading this chapter, you should have no trouble adding, managing or connecting to members in your Elgg network.Where to buy this book You can buy Elgg Social Networking from the Packt Publishing website: http://www.packtpub.com/elgg-social-networking/book. you could download the full chapter here: http://www.packtpub.com/files/Elgg-Social-Networking-Sample-Chapter-Chapter-3-Users-Profiles-and-Connections.pdf Free shipping to the US, UK, Europe and selected Asian countries. For more information, please read our shipping policy.

• This page was last modified 18:41, 1 December 2008.