social networking

As the maintainer of the Facebook-style Statuses module for the Drupal content management system, I like to read around the web and see what kinds of statistics and innovations I can find on comparable systems. This week, there was a gold mine that indicates that the "status movement" is going to grow its already expansive online presence exponentially.

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.