Creating Communities and Social Networks with Drupal

Everyone loves social networks but not the associated “noise.” Learn about opportunities to capture your own community (using Drupal). During this talk Michael will review key concepts in designing, maintaining and promoting communities online; including a project recently completed for Bloomberg Media.

Did you know that Drupal is a great tool for building social networks? Many options are available such as building with a collection of popular modules, using Commons, or going totally custom. Matthew's section will cover all three building options to help you realize every project is special.

Users, profiles, friends, groups, searching, and status walls: oh the fun you will have. You may have even heard clients already ask..."Can my website do X just like Facebook and LinkedIn?" Presentation will cover a brief history of social networking compared to Drupal's history. We will observe a comparison in thoughts of our community and how to build interactive collaborations. Many people ask me, "why build something Facebook and LinkedIn already provide?". Because FB and LI provide a specific purpose. Example Facebook is a great place for family to stay connected and drunk friend pictures. LinkedIn is a great place to have recruiter find your resume. However, we will continue to see a trend in niche businesses which need to embrace social networks. Social business is here and it is changing they way we work on a daily basis. Not to mention utilizing Drupal's awesome ability to manage multilingual-social-networks.

Topics will be fairly high level and understandable by all skill levels from new users to business managers. Most technical aspect will be bragging about Drupal's ability to easily scale high availability hosting. Plus mention of cache issues for content that is completely authenticated (all social networks).