The Elgg of the future

 

Most of Elgg community members who have spent or clocked in few or several hours, days, weeks, months or years will agree with most of us that even though Elgg software is a work in progress at its early infant stage – it  is the best social network engine of the future. I too agree with this statement.  

What Elgg core team developers and plugin developers have created is something truly wonderful. Elgg social network engine and its plugins is the best parts of the web social network revolution. How? The source code is open source, the online Elgg community is collaborative and welcoming — without pop corns and soft drinks!

As a website developer, I am constantly reminded by the current and the past online changes that the future of the web will be very different from what we are designing or developing today.

Why is Elgg standing a better chance to face the future?

For any software that is active or being developed now to stand a chance to survive the future:

  • The elgg code is a open source and accessible by online community.
  • Elgg works on both the simple and complex devices
  • The  community users or members treat each other like a family
  • The main focus for the Elgg future versions are based on the end users not the devices that the users are using or will be using in future to access the web
  • The community members are willing to share coding secrets or donate their free coding time; and computer skills or talents and yes, even when keeping those secrets would put most of Elgg developers at a competitive world class advantage.

Should the web be for everyone?

It depends.  Most of us will agree that the web should always be open and free of restrictions from the big corporations and big brother. However, as the online and mobile device have become complex and more accessible, most of us can quickly notice that the web of the future and devices have started to lose the war on keeping source codes and web open.

To be honest, I have spent most several years online and have noticed several websites which are build on JavaScripts which most of the time always run in problems like failing to load properly or entirely or the users can not load the websites because some browsers automatically or manually turn the JavaScripts off or the work devices or personal firewall blocks most JavaScripts and hence JavaScripts fails to load as intended by the website developers. In addition, most web sites perform miserably when it comes to mobile devices, for example most of the web sites take long to load because most of the applications are poorly designed.

Sometimes I have encountered navigation menus which are not working properly and sometimes the hidden website contents not showing even after several clicking and sadly even some times the websites end up loading a white page or the “Screen of Death”.

Most open source which are build now are complex and powerful, but normally fail to understand the user’s educational level and physical limitations to use those sites.

And this is where Elgg has come out strong. The community has opened the community members to design plugins that fits their needs and then feel free to share the plugins with other community members. Most of Elgg plugins are build heavily with PHP and mixed with some CSS and HTML5, sprinkled with JavaScript and many more new languages. This combination of languages enable the Elgg users to interact with Elgg sites with easiness incase JavaScript fails to load properly.

Elgg development is not done … yet

Elgg has evolved for a short period of time. Half the Earth’s human populations have never used the online sites nor have access to internet. However, soon things are changing first. With the rapid mobile devices development, they will soon be part of the online community and when that time comes, the internet we know today will be very different from what we know today.

For most people living on Earth, mobile will always be the best way to access the web instead of the most common desktop computers. For sure, most of the future mobile devices will not be very complex or powerful like the iPhones or iPods, iPads and other sofiscated devices of today. On the other hand, for most developed countries like U.S and others, the web will use the most powerful devices known to mankind with screens as big as an elephant or dinosaurs, tiny eyes web glasses “Google glasses”, mini wearable watches and not surprising-- even the screen-less devices.

To sum it all in one sentence, even thought the unique Elgg social network engine is developed by web developers from around the world who are willing to give their best, share new tools, freely helping online community members, the future of Elgg is bright and it is exciting to be part of it.

If you agree or disagree with this discussion feel free to leave a comment or thoughts.

 

    • There are very little number of people who think like you. I think like you but the age group of 17-25 and majority of others do not. Very little number of people "think" - they consume what is being "fed".
    • Internet has become a monopoly of FB, G+, Amazon - 4 or 5 major players. Many companies in SE Asia and probably other countries are having a FB address *only* as their website address and no www. address.
    • Has this been Microsoft there would have been many anti-trust cases and similar, but nothing against FB or G etc
    • Apps are the actual walled garden these days, and though there has been movements like SOPA there has been no move from the community to make the web web-browser based (what you can do with apps you can do better with browser) and to make the web actually an inter---net of inter-connected multitude of websites.
    • There has been no more in the last 5 or 7 years and will be no more php web softwares like WP, Drupal, Joomla, Elgg etc - the young talents these days are either immersed in FB or has to take up jobs in the giant corps. We have lost the 2000-2003s for ever. Money and job was not the issue in those years when the Free and open-source once created, invented and large corporations followed - now it is reverse.
    • The greatest mistake that WP, Drupal, Joomla, Elgg was lack of interoperability - I cannot login to a WP site with Drupal or Elgg credentials, I cannot add a member there in my friend-list here, I cannot post there from here (provided permissions are so set). If this would have been there would have been no FBlike monopoly. (Think of the open protocol of email, like how you can write from  yahoo to hotmail, from hot to gmail etc)
    • Elgg is great and can be greater. But there seems to be lack of "timespace" though there is lot of activity taking in Elgg. Thanks and gratitude to the devs.