"Friends" is mostly used for private purpose.

For public use, I am more interested in something like twitter or anything that can create a fan base. In a community not everyone is the same.   For example, some members might have a lot of fans, some people want to become  fans of certain members. It's more like a one-way kind of request. If someone wants to become a fan of a member, this member can either fan back or just ignore, but this fan will be added to this member's fan list.

What I was thinking is, based on what we have already for the friends thing, can we add something like this:  a member can send two requests: 1, add as friend;  or/and, 2, become a fan/ follower of another member.   It's kind of a combination of facebook and twitter in a much simpler way. 

odove...would becoming a "Fan" of another member put their posts on your journal....but unlike friends your posts would now be on your "fans" journal?

This concept is actually very simple. At this point, we can just ignore the journal part. Let journal only deals with friends.

What's important is to know how many fans a member has with links to the fan's profile. At the same time, a member with a lot of fans still can be a fan of another member.



============================================

Cool's Friends List <---> two-ways (private or public)

Membera Memberb Memberc
Memberd Membere Memberf




Cool's Fans List <--- one-way (public)

Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp
Membera Memberr Membery
Memberv Membere Memberp




Cool is a Fan of the following members ---> one-way (public)

Memberh Memberj Memberk

============================================


Why this is important?

For some sites, "friends" might be enough. But for a lot of other sites, like entertainment, sports, or anything that evolves the competition, evolves different levels of quality and creativity, "friends" doesn't really mean much. We need to encourage the members with higher levels to add content on the site like creating articles, writing blogs, or just posting whatever is going on with them. I think "Fans" or "Followers" is a better word to get them motivated and do more on the site. And don't forget, everyone can have fans, even ones that are less competitive. Just like twitter, you can always figure out a way to get some followers.


ActiveSocial has a lot of potentials. But before member can even dig into those cool features we want them to become more active on the community.


This doesn't have to be complicated. Just show the fan's list with links to their profiles can really help.

This something we are working on for Active Social 1.6. Fans/Favorites will be quite different from friends. Friends actually have a certain degree of security and privacy. Fans/Favorites does not. This will allow you to use Group Types to use the Group functionality for features such as Fan Pages, Celebrity profiles, Business directories, etc. Instead of actually becoming a member of a group you can become a fan. A group can become a "Fan" of other groups. This allows you to further create connections in addition to Friends and members.

This sounds great, Will. With the Fans/Favorites features, will groups be able to publish content for members only, members and fans, and everyone? I can see using this for our soccer teams to publish, say, practice schedules and social events only for members and game schedules for fans and/or the public, depending on the preferences of the group.

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

When are you planning to release version 1.6?

Well, we pushed the release date of 1.6 up, but this functionality has been moved to 1.7. 1.7 will follow shortly after.

Will,

Im really looking forward to the Fans/Favorites feature. Great direction. This will work well in our new site .

Thanks
Ben