Features of Social Network

Following are the desirable features that social networking site will possess:

Accounts

User accounts are pretty much given on any data-driven site where you have users who are contributing to the site. If you need to know who your users are, then you need some way of tracking their accounts.

This will include looking at the registration process where our users create their initial accounts. To make sure that we block bots and other programs from creating accounts in an automated manner, we must implement a reCAPTCHA system. We must implement an email verification system to make sure that our users actually are what they claim to be.we must also setting up a permissions system that we can build onto over time.

reCAPTCHA

Profiles

A user's profile is really just an extension of his/her account. The difference being that the account holds the login information and the profile holds all the personal identifiers. It holds the description of the user, the user's attributes, and their photo (avatar). We must creating a user's profile in a way that is flexible enough for all systems to use. We must also handle creating an avatar in such a way that a user can upload a picture and then crop it suitably. As the profile contains a great deal of information about the user, we must also implement some forms of privacy to allow them to hide some bits and show others. and finally create personal page and allow them to have a vanity URL

Profiles

Friends

The concept of having friends in a community is the glue that keeps people coming back to your site. A friend is a user whom you have stated, whom you trust and allow to see information about you, and about whom you are generally interested in knowing. Think of a friend as a connection, a colleague, and so on. Different terms describe the same concept for different community topics.

we will  implement the Friends feature and also discuss how to search for them, find them in the site's listings, and import your contacts into the site to find your friends. We will also implement a micro-blog allowing your users to provide a status about where they are and what they are currently doing.

This status will then show up on your micro-blog and your friend's micro-blog as an alert.

micro-blog

Messaging

Messaging is essential to any community site as it allows users to communicate with one another directly. This can come in many forms. You can send a message to a user, that is sent directly to the user via email. Or you can allow your user to send a message via the site, that is then stored in the recipient's inbox. A notification is then sent out to the recipient. This last form will be easier for you to manage as a site administrator.

We will create a full blown messaging system that will resemble a web-based email application similar to Hotmail or Gmail. As part of our interface we will show a list of existing friends to send messages to. And we will learn how to implement the Xinha WYSIWYG editor in a way that can be re-used easily across the
site for complex input.

Message

Media galleries

There are many communities that are very dependent upon media galleries. An example of this is YouTube or something similar. This is frequently the feature that can draw the largest percentage of your community back to your site. For that reason, it is very important to understand how to build a media system rather

than an image gallery, video gallery, and so on. We will build a generic media management system that will allow you to host videos, photos, resumes, or any number of physical files with limited additional tweaking.

Media galleries

Blogging

Blogging is often a major feature in any community site as it gives those who enjoy speaking to the world a tool to do just that. On the other hand though, the output of your blog generates free content for those who are more on the voyeuristic side to read up and follow along with your blogs. One of the biggest benefits for

a community with active bloggers is that you are acquiring a large amount of free content to feed the various search engine spiders with. This in turn will help you get your search ranking up, that will drive more traffic to your site, and will in turn grow your community.

With search engines, users, and security in mind, we will invest some time to address an issue that plagues many dynamic websites—query string data being used to determine page output. Let's face it, from a user's point of view, seeing a bunch of variable names in the query string with random auto-generated record IDs and 32 character GUIDs is just not that user-friendly and at times downright confusing. Add to this that search engines these days seem to be able to navigate some of this query string mumbo jumbo, but we are losing a key opportunity to optimize our site for keywords by spoofing URLs as though our keywords were directories. We will continue from our profile's example and extend our vanity URL support so that we

can have something along the lines of www.sitename.com/blogs/AtulGupta/myarticle-name.aspx.

Forums

Everyone is well aware of what a forum is. For a social network, it is a disconnected form of communication where people can post something to discuss and others can happen across the posted item over time to add their two cents. Frequently in the developer world, you will have a community that is 100 percent focused around this sort of feature in the form of a technical help forum. For our site that centers on helping others figure out how to run an aquarium, we will find this feature useful.

Forums

Groups

Groups to me are a form of container for like-minded individuals. It allows a community to pool its resources. A group could comprise of people who are interested in the same topic, people for or against a certain presidential candidate, or people representing a company. The common focus for a group is that when someone who is part of the group posts content to the site, all the members of that group are notified. If a user sends a message to a group, then all the members become recipients of that message.

In our site, we will support common concepts such as public and private groups. For private groups you will have to request a membership and should be granted access prior to getting into the group. We will also extend the group concept and provide all our groups with a private forum.

Comments

Commenting is just another way of allowing your users to interact with the content and other members of your social network. There isn't a lot that is special about the commenting concept. We will build out a custom user control to handle commenting any physical object in our system that has a supporting table behind it. This means that we can have comments on anything such as photos, videos, profiles, forum

postings, blogs, and so on. To sum up, anything can have a comment!

Tags

Tags are very important to the navigation of your community. A tag is usually one or two keywords attached to some content or item in your site. This keyword may be attached to one or many items in the site by one or many users of the site. The more frequently the tag is applied, the larger its subscription base becomes. We can then show the tag in a cloud of other tags. This cloud would be sorted with the most frequently used keywords. Again, the more the keywords are used, the more they get displayed in the cloud.

We can then place a tag cloud in various places of our site such as the homepage, on a user's profile, or on a group's homepage. This will then act as a jumping off point for all of their most frequently tagged content. Usually, this promotes clicking around on the site. The more people move around on the site, the more likely they are to add tags of their own or some other form of content. This will give some activity to your community. We will build our tagging and tag cloud feature as another user control that can be attached to any object with a handful of different display types.

Ratings

Ratings are often a very important part of any community-supplied content site. This allows the whole community to be in charge of what content takes precedence on the site. Our rating tool will not only use the AJAX rating tool but will also extend, so that rather than applying a rating directly to an item, we can rate individual attributes of an item. All those ratings will then be rolled up, and that score will be the rating that is displayed for the actual item.

This feature will have the ability to be attached to any item in the site as well. Once built, this feature will really help us get the right content for our community. It also provides our users with the sense of belonging, as they are now able to provide their opinion on just about anything. The screenshot below shows how tagging or commenting can be done.

Ratings

Mark as Answer

For any forum to be successful, it is important to have the basic infrastructure to post a question and reply. Once this is available, the next important thing is to ensure resolution/responses to posted queries because ultimately that is what will drive the number of users to the forums. To ensure forums are successful, the forums should provide ability to mark a reply as answer. A correctly marked answer will result in specific points being awarded to the user and this helps build his/her reputation on the site.

Voting

Voting is a way to moderate the content on a community site and also recognize people who are contributing by providing valuable comments in forums. Users need to have the right to vote positively and negatively on a question or a reply posted on the forum. This helps other users to not read the entire question and associated
replies, but focus on those that are voted higher. Similar to Mark as Answer, Voting also helps build an individual's reputation.

Medals

Once users start to accrue points based on their replies that are either marked as answers or voted in favor of, they start to earn medals. This is a visual indication of their reputation (see the following screenshot) on the site and the higher the number of medals, the higher the confidence that community will have in what this person has to say.