VBulletin social networking features

[ryanhellyer]

I've noticed on a few sites that I use recently, that they have upgraded to a new version of VBulletin which features various social networking functions.

The most interesting feature they have is the ability to create your own usergroup and recruit people to go join it, much like FaceBook does. They also have upgraded user profile pages with FaceBook like wall functionality.

Have any of you used these before? Are they all they're cracked up to be? Or just useless features added to bloat your site out?

[Willemina]

Hello,
I think these new features will be useful for large sites with very active communities. But using them on smaller sites would seem unwise; by moving the chatter between members into profile pages will reduce the main content on your forum. It seems to me that you want to keep the content within your forum as high as possible. The only situations I see this being useful is for those huge forums with many thousands of members of highly active members who would like to place their stamp on their profile pages and to create their own discussion groups for specific topics.

[ryanhellyer]

Thanks for the input Willemina

I wonder if VBulletin could be used as a one stop shop for creating social networks now? Could a VBulletin site become a competitor for FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo etc? Obviously there would need to be some serious themng and a bit of custom coding to get it working properly, but it doesn't seem entirely impossible to me. Most of the features are there. And VBulletin is presumably able to run across multiple servers fairly easily (or as easy as that type of thing gets) so scaling should be fairly straight forward.