To illustrate the point made in my last blog post, I'd like to offer some visual representations of the burst in social media adoption within Drupal. To start, here's the usage chart (with outliers corrected) for my Facebook-style Statuses module for Drupal. The figures shown in the chart are estimated to be about half of the actual adoption rate because of the way the figures are collected.
The social networking scene has been evolving over the last few years. Today, Facebook's 250 million users demonstrate beyond doubt that social networking is an important movement, and one that Drupal should pay special attention to as it evolves. But social networks are a different animal than conventional websites, and one must understand the differences in order to build a successful social network.
I was recently asked to download a series of images from a remote server. The image URLs were not known ahead of time, so to figure them out, I had to submit a search form, parse the results for a way to determine the file name, and then download the images onto the local server.
I've been working on a module for BabelUp lately called user_deco. It allows users to add images ("decos") to the site, and then "buy" them using a point system (userpoints). The decos are then added to the user's profile. It's a great way to encourage community participation, because decos are a fun way to "spend" userpoints (known as BabelPoints on BabelUp) and userpoints are gained for contributing content on the site.
