Two weeks ago, I made public the work that was done on the redesign of Crawl. I use the term redesign as it signifies a reformatting of the same content, but in a different configuration. This term is not entirely apt for this particular phase of the Crawl website. In past redesigns, the ordering of the content, the architecture of the content and the ways the content can be interacted with did not change. But with this most recent phase, things did change.
The impetus for this change came from an extension. This extension was a component called JomSocial. JomSocial (JS) is the extension from the Malaysian based Joomla! developer Azrul. JS is a social networking extension for the Joomla! CMS. In some ways JS is trying to be a clone of Facebook. This is not surprising, Facebook is the most successful and dominant social network in the world (in terms of standalone commercial social networks). But within JS are features that while popularised by Facebook have emerged as social networking staples. In other words there are features that are part of JS that are not concretely connected with the closed and proprietary system of Facebook but have become known as social networking tools. Some of these tools include:
- Status Updates
- Profile Pages
- Walls
- Photo Sharing (and any other form of content, text, links, video etc…)
None of these concepts are new.
Status Updates are merely public diary entries.
Profile Pages are merely evolving biographies.
Walls are merely guestbooks.
Photo Sharing and the sharing of other content is as old as Art.
But when you combine them into a single service, they have the potential to become powerful. In the case of Facebook, they combined to form a behemoth of free private services designed to sell ads and market trash.
But the benefit of the homogenisation and normilisation of social networking services like Facebook and its precursors such as MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Blogger, Second Life and AOL among others is the spreading of the awareness that simple social constructs need not be foreign fields in an online context.
This lesson is of great benefit to niche audiences. Audiences such as people involved in the Artist Run Initiative world in Australia. An Artist Run Initiative is an organisation run by artists, not for profit, but to benefit other artists. It is for this concept that I founded Crawl two years ago.
Crawl began its life as a series of Joomla! articles and a dozen events in EventList running on Joomla! 1.0.28.
It now runs on Joomla! 1.5.10, and the last extension I installed was JomSocial.
Filed under: Social Networking
