One of my essential daily tools is Gtalk or Google Talk. I use it to communicate with people in my own company, clients, contractors, suppliers and just about anyone who uses it. Gmail allows you to do two things directly from your browser:

• Instant messaging
• Gmail notifications

I would like to see a component created for BuddyPress that allows users to connect and communicate via a similar browser chat to Gmail. I remember when facebook launched their chat facility it really opened up a new avenue of communication. Suddenly you could chat to whoever was online in real-time.

In South Africa a mobile chat system called MXit became very popular and as noted below started out using Jabber to power its discussion platform, read more:

Until February 2008, the MXit service was backed by ejabberd, an open source instant messaging server that is based on the open standard Jabber. MXit replaced ejabberd with a new self-developed, high scalability software core to assure continual growth and innovation requirements can be met. Although external Jabber clients were originally allowed to connect to the MXit backed servers, this had to be discontinued due to instability induced by unreliable and untrustworthy sites.

I have mentioned that we are looking developing a social network for a political party, we need an IM bp-component to improve information sharing. Some of the people involved in the volunteer programs are in areas where people don’t have internet in their homes, but they almost everyone has a mobile phone. Volunteers will need to be able to access the social networking site and gain access to relevant geographic information, examples:

• Events in their area
• Volunteers located near by
• Contact details of key people involved

There are PHP libraries like Lightr, which is in Alpha, or xmpphp, which seems to be the better option. These libraries could allow us to integrate BuddyPress with a Jabber server. Some things I have noted from my research:

• It would seem like eJabberd is the more popular Jabber server to run, it has a high level of compliance with XMPP and supports distributed computing by clusterin, all quite appealing!
• JabberMixClient is a great GPL mobile client that could be used on mobile phones
• Still note sure what would work as a Jabber Client for inside BuddyPress, maybe JWChat will do the trick, it is open source so thats a definite plus….

Not much of a fundi on the topic of Jabber clients and servers, but would definitely like to hear back from people on what they think.

I have noticed lately that all the major social media and social networking websites are coming out with a mobile version of their website hosted like this – m.socialsite.com – If you view it in a browser it looks like an extremely stripped down version of the main website. Click on these websites and see for yourself:

• http://m.facebook.com/
• http://m.twitter.com/
• http://m.flickr.com/
• http://m.youtube.com/
• http://m.linkedin.com/
• http://m.muti.co.za/
• http://m.last.fm/
• http://m.delicious.com/
• http://m.plaxo.com/
• http://m.pownce.com/

My suggestion is as follows:

• Create a theme for BuddyPress
• The theme needs to include with a bunch of mobile tools
• The tools should include a mobile optimized website at m.socialsite.com
• Users needs an easy way to upload photos and notes to the website via SMS and MMS messages
• Users should also be  able to receive new BuddyPress messages on their phones via SMS, but might be costly to implement.

A well-known South African blogger called Matthew Buckland wrote and awesome article on the future of the mobile internet. Read the article if you are interested in in what I am talking about.

I am going to write next about how I see a need for combining the mobile theme with a Jabber Client to allow users to chat anywhere, connect and grow the network in their geographic location.

Please give feedback?

In the past couple of months I have been doing some work for a political party in South Africa. We built a volunteer website to get party supporters to join as volunteers to help spread the word.

As part of my research I registered on the John McCain website first. The website provided its supporters with some key tools for spreading the word and supporting the party. Once you logged in you would land on your action center with big call-to-action icons requesting people to do take action. All user interactions could potentially score that use points. The user’s points would be displayed in a sidebar widget. Please note that the social network part of the website has now been closed due to election being over and John McCain loosing.

I decided to try out the Barack Obama website next and was pleasantly surprised when I found out it wasn’t ASP.NET like the McCain website! When the website first appears, the viewer sees a ’splash’ page – an entry page with a video and a signup form to join the Barack Obama ‘team’ – basically to receive Email concerning the Obama campaign. The Obama site promotes its own group and event system with the my.barackobama.com section, their statement is to “Organize Locally with our online Tools”:

• Talk to Voters
• Join a Local Group
• Find an Event
• Fundraise
• Blog

I have a project that needs me to do the following:

• Build a volunteer database and get the volunteers to promote the party
• Get the volunteers to aid in driving the objectives of the party
• Empower the volunteers by providing them the tools to connect in their geographic area
• Drive discussion amongst the supporters and volunteers

My aim is to use BuddyPress to build a community of party supporters. There are a number of bp-components that are missing, like the following:

• Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
• User point system tracking and allocating points for user interaction
• Action center and user dashboard page displaying member stats and call-to-action tools
• Fund raising module allowing users to create and run fund raising initiatives for the party
• Design a mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible
• Integrating a Jabber client into buddypress allowing an in browser chat experience
• Points status and leader board sidebar widget

I will be blogging each of the above points over the next day or so…..

All components we write will be released as open source and buddypress users will have full access to source code. My objective is to get feedback on my ideas to ensure that we write useful addons for buddypress.