Hi Will,

I would say the user profile page where users can create their own content is the primary feature of a social networking site and ours is really no-where near capable of that kind of thing. I'm sure the majority of resources for sites like myspace and facebook go into supporting the user profile page and allowing users to add their own content. I think its really fairly complicated to support those kind of scenarios and maintain security. Allowing untrusted users to add rich content to a site like videos, widgets, or anything with javascript opens up a big can of worms in terms of security. Big sites like Facebook and Myspace have a constant battle on their hands trying to keep out malicious content. It can be done by carefully controlling what is and what is not allowed, but thats where it gets to be a lot of work and its not something that really gets solved once and for all, its a constant battle because the bad guys are very clever.

Consider the basic Html content feature in mojoportal, it allows you to put any javscript you want in there because it assumes you are a trusted user if you have permission to use it. So you can put any kind of object like YouTube videos etc in there, but for untrusted users its not a good plan as they can also put malicious javascript in there designed to steal users cookies and hijack accounts etc. So you can't let them add raw objects or raw javascript, you have to implement widgets that they can put in that are very controlled. So there's a lot to do to really build a social site framework. Its really not a near term goal for me to make mojoPortal a platform for building a MySpace or Facebook type of site, maybe eventually we'll look into that after reaching the main goals. My main goal is to be a platform for company web sites and intranets with core publishing features and office/collaboration type features and facilities for easily plugging in custom line of business apps. I think company web sites need to take advantage of social networking sites but from my perspective the way to do that is to leverage existing social sites and do integration so that users can easily share or connect with your site content on those sites using their integration apis. This way you can use existing popular social networking sites to drive traffic to your own site. In other words I'd rather see a feature which allows Facebook users to put some content from a mojoportal site on their Facebook profile, and co-opt their platform rather than try to compete with it by trying to implement a complex profile/user content system within the mojoportal site.

At any rate, I won't be working on that kind of thing anytime soon. I have already carved out an ambitious agenda for my own efforts on my road map.

Best,

Joe