social networks

I'm currently using a recently published book entitled, 'Drupal 6 - Social Networking' as a guide for building a social network site. The following are excerpts from the book from the publishers, Packt Publishing. See: www.packtpub.com. I should say that the publishers, Packt Publishing, part sponsored the recent DrupalNGo Camp and sprint in Galway and asked if I would post some excerpts from their book.

Drupal 6 Social Networking: Communicating with Users

Our users can communicate with one another, which is great, but quite often as an administrator the need may arise for us to communicate with a user or users on our site. It may be to remind them about the web site or to inform active users about new changes to the site, which they may not have been made aware of.

This article is extracted from the "Drupal 6 Social Networking" book. In this article, you will learn:

• About mailing lists, and how to use them with our Drupal social network
• How to use an offline approach for contacting our users
• How to use blocks of content to get a message across to your users

We have launched two social networks using Drupal (one is live and kicking...and one is already in beta) and are looking to expand our team to several more drupal developers who have experience working with Drupal social networks or social media sites. We're proud to say that our current sites have been been built pretty well (we like to think so) and are focused on two passionate communities. We would like to recruit a few experienced drupal developers who want to work on a few exciting projects and help us accelerate our development.

Qualifications and Requirements
- PHP, MySQL, Ajax

YourSports (Seattle) is an online broadcast network for high school and small college sports that is syndicating games through regional newspapers. Check us out in action on the Seattle Times at www.seattletimes.com/highschoolsports.

Summary:
I want to write two modules for Drupal as part of Google Summer of Code. One called meme_tracker and the other called machine_learning_api. The meme_tracker module will use the machine_learning_api to intelligently filter and group content from both internal and external content sources. The module's purpose is to find and display to a community in real time the most interesting conversations and memes within the community as they emerge.

Hello Drupliers. My name is Kyle Mathews. I'm a grad student in Information Systems at Brigham Young University working as a research assistant to several faculty members here. We are studying how and where social software can be used in education.

In the past eight months, I've built a number of classroom websites using Drupal. I've learned a considerable bit about Drupal in the process, became very involved in the community, and am writing a module (writing_assignment -- still a work in progress btw). I've loved most everything about Drupal but have found Drupal is missing an important component for building the perfect social learning website. This itches. So, in the best open-source fashion, I'm applying to Google Summer of Code to scratch my itch.