Occasionally a business may see the need to add some kind of social aspect to their website. For example, if you were selling software over the Internet and wanted to provide support in a community setting you may decide to install a forum script to handle this. If you were running a gaming website you may want the rich features that a social network could provide, such as profiles, instant messaging, etc.

As Social Networking has now become commonplace, with websites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube taking the top spots in Alexa rankings it’s easy to see where the lowly forum has started to lose a bit of its appeal. Only a few years ago a Social Network would sound scary and a forum would be the epitome of interaction with others on the Internet, and way before then we were A/S/L-ing each other in chat rooms. In many ways I feel sorry for the creators of forums, as the shifting interests of users has led many forum scripts down the road to almost becoming secondary social networks. The latest vBulletin release gifted its users with user comments in profiles, user galleries and much more, which sounds like a great thing, but my original appeal with vBulletin back in its second version was that it was simple, yet extremely powerful at the same time. The hacking/modification community behind vBulletin was years ahead of its game, and if only vBulletin were to become open source software I’m sure every forum on earth would sport their disclaimer in their footers.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that a Forum is a Social Network, so in many ways they have existed for a while. Now that these tools are easier to create it seems everyone wants their own full-blown social network installed for no real business reason at all! I’ve tried a number of hosting companies that have tried this approach, and the popular helpdesk/live chat solutions have always won me over. All I’ll say is that if you wish to install something onto your web host then you should really come up with a good reason for needing it. About five years ago I spent countless days toying with and writing my own vBulletin hacks in PHP to run on my forums, yet as the number grew and the website became nothing but a big toy I couldn’t stop myself. In todays era of one-click installations in Cpanel and one-click plugin installations in WordPress and Firefox it’s easy to see how more is more.

A Forum and a Social Network have their own place, and it takes small efforts like Vanilla to really see what a forum can do for you without all the bells and whistles installed. If you feel that a full social network is needed for your website then go ahead and add one, but more often than not you’ll find that too many features put off users. We won’t admit it, but we like less features when compared to more. Just look at what happened to Digg when they allowed image submissions and you’ll see why the less-powerful tool is often the best.