(HBSN) How to Build a Social Network

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal so you don't have to worry about installation, hosting or upgrading

Drupal Gardens is a gem in the rough, built on the Drupal 7 core - currently in an alpha release - extended with functionality such as a WYSIWYG editor (CKeditor), media management, a theme builder, and basic "query builder" (i.e. simpleviews) capability. We're working with the various module maintainers, and contributing back almost all of our development efforts to the Drupal community. Architecturally, Drupal Gardens is built on the ideas of an open social web; we markup data with RDFa, we implemented single-sign on using OpenID as our identity layer, we integrate with third-party services, and we allow people to export the code, the theme and data that makes up their site. We'll be sharing more technical details as we make progress, but we like to believe it will be a hosted service "done right".

Next Jump runs perhaps the largest set of direct merchant offers businesses in the world, making the growing preponderance of offers in social games seem primitive by comparison. It operates employee discount and reward programs on behalf of 90,000 corporations, organizations and affinity groups which reaches more than 100 million consumers. Next Jump connects 28,000 retailers and manufacturers to these consumers, typically getting the merchants to offer deep discounts to its members. In Kim’s eyes, this is a much better way to advertise. His pitch to merchants everywhere is this: “Take your ad budget and use it to lower prices for targeted sets of customers. The user is in market, and conversion rates are through the roof.” According to Kim, Next Jump’s conversion rate on offers is 11 to 1, compared to 1000 to 1 or worse for typical Internet ad conversion rates.

On stage revealing the new product was Bradley Horowitz, Google’s Vice President for product Management. While introducing the product, Mr. Horowitz focused on the human penchant to share their experiences and the social media phenomenon of wanting to share it in real-time. These two key themes were core philosophies behind Google Buzz.