Federation! (allow for communication between different elgg main servers)

A feature that I think would be totally innovative is the ability to communicate between different elgg servers, different instances, so that you can have an account in one place and add friends from other elgg website that's totally independent.

This would give real freedom to social networking and at the same time it will ease the pain of the maintenance of one single server (I'm sure that it would take lots and lots of money to maintain an elgg server the more popular it gets). The main aspect that makes a social network powerful is the same aspect that can make it fall: Popularity. And federated servers would help join forces between different sources to achieve this safely.

XMPP/Jabber is a very good example of this. If it had been yet another unfederated protocol, it wouldn't have gone as far as it is now. Even Google has released it's own XMPP server and they are extending it with Google Wave. It would be very good if elgg could be part of this.

In fact, perhaps making use of the architecture that XMPP has already built would bring more power to elgg.

I know this might be hard to accomplish... but I wanted to throw out the idea because I think that this would be a real help (perhaps a requirement) for elgg to be a real competitor to other popular social communities like facebook.

Feedback and Planning

Feedback and Planning

Discussions about the past, present, and future of Elgg and this community site.