2008 SIAlumni.com Roadmap
All,
I wanted to post a quick update on what I am thinking for 2008. First, I have been working with a different web system (Drupal for those interested) for some other projects that I am involved with through my consulting business. It offers some pretty exciting features and I think addresses some of the issues we have been having here at SIAlumni.com.
- One Sign-On, many sites: I have read more than one blog complaining about how many usernames and passwords it takes to keep up with all the different social networking sites. We can fix this with an upgrade which will support Single Sign On through OpenID. Any other site that supports OpenID will use the same info, so sign on once and get access to several sites.
- Embedding media: Some of you may remember me whining about divided efforts with regards to the other Alumni groups popping up on the various social networking sites. Our community is not unique in that regard. An upgrade will allow users to embed Flickr streams and other media from popular social networking sites. So upload to your preferred site and it automagically appears at SIAlumni. This gives users the option to post here or elsewhere - doesn't matter - we can see it all from one site. Will also allow for multimedia support (video, audio).
- Better Social Networking. Set up your SIAlumni account to post to Twitter. Organize around the site using Groups of your chossing (think Yahoo Groups lite). More ways to get and stay connected. Perhaps even monitor the RSS feed from the site from Second Life (TBD).
There are many other advantages to making the upgrade. I plan on adding a test site so users here can take a look and provide feedback. I hope to get that done in January. If we decide to proceed with the switch I will be asking for donations to cover the cost of writing the scripts needed to move the data from this system to the new one. The cost of developing the system itself is already covered by my other projects, but moving the data from one system to another is a whole other issue that takes some expertise.
All in all I am very excited about expanding our site to include other networks. Stay tuned for more updates...
Regards,
Coby