daily new plugin .... awesome , recomended

everybody could not be everybodys friend, that is a "facebook-bug" ;-)
for my opinion it's necessary to distinguish between friends and followers
as the plugin says. . ." Allows users to follow interesting content + conversations"

maybe the users are overcharged, but i could imagine they love it
time will show . . . .

@evan thanks, do you sleep? ;-))

But if you are a friend dosen't that negate you from being a follower?

I was thinking about this today. You follow someone and then become a friend, the following status would disapear. Also if you can follow someone, that someone should have the ability to block the follower, unfollow must take care of that?

On the image example it looks like you can follow yourself?

In elgg you can friend someone, all that really does is echo what is already in the river. How I think it should work is you have to request friendship from the proposed friend. Once friendship is granted then your friends activity becomes avaliable to you. Only the admin should be able to see all activity or if the admin grants everyone the ability to see all activity.

Here at elgg.org it is benificial to see everyone's activity as we might be helped from anothers question and or answer. On another site you might not care if someone you don't know is stoping at the local coffee shop. Groups are great for casual friends or making new friends of comon intrests. So now that person stops in the coffeee drinker group and discusses what local coffee shops they stoped by. If you become friends with the coffee drinker then their activity might become intresting to you, but what if their activity starts to become anoying, then you should be able to hide their activity and where I would use unfollow, politely hiding their activity from your but keeping the friendship intact.

Just my thoughts 

@ghumanz, thanks!

@manfred, I definitely agree -- a good distinction to make

@steve, Typically a site would only have one or the other I imagine, but that should be left up to the admin to ultimately decide.

Unfollow is simply the opposite of follow.  Blocking users is outside the scope of this plugin.  This plugin also does not support "follow requests" where following requires approval.

You cannot follow yourself.  If you are finding that you can, that is a bug that I'll need to fix.

@steve i understand your point of view, it's logic 
for me a 'public-fun-community' site could have friends and followers, but following  "interesting content + conversations" has nothing to do with 'friends', that's why these topics should not mixed
let the people something to think about . . . she is my friend, but why does she not follow me? . . . and . . . he follows me? i thought i am his friend!? . . .  ;-)
 

@evan if user is e. g. on blog-page the tab 'friends' shows the blogs of your friends
so user expected to get all blogs of all members he follows, when choosing following-tab
but user is forwarded to the actvity-page with selected following-tab
this does his job
but is not the same the friends-tab works ;-)

@manfred Then in current elgg, when you friend someone you are following them. When they friend you back they are following you. Where does the friend part come in? Maybe, I guess if you looked at their profiles and see they are both friends to each other then they must be friends. It just seems weird to me that there is no perk for being a friend. 

I like Evans thought, that you use one or the other, now it makes sence. I still would like to see the admin have power to grant access to "all" In that mode, there would be a perk for becoming a friend. 

@Evan Is there a Doc to look at on how the friend plugin is intended to function? I looked here http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Plugins/Friends but there is no information listed.

@steve assume you are living in a land that is not very democratic and where companies are looking for the employees friends in a community . . . .
in both cases it could be a problem to be friend with bin ladens daughter or your a friend with companies most hated person ;-))
but if you 'follow' her for some reasons it's an other thing . . .
if you are in trouble it's difficult to convince with the argument: even when " . . .  they are both friends to each other then they must be friends" . . .
i think nobody will listen you at this point and nobody outside the community will understand it . . .
it's a terrible strange example, sorry ;-))
on the other way, both friend-models together, are good for communication . . .
if you are politician and your real friend is also politician but in a other party . . . as follower you can stay tuned what he is doing . . .
and not at least for data-miner it's very difficult to interpret the data, if you use both ;-)
but how i said before, maybe the user is overcharged with both models
or loves it
:-)

I have 2 levels, profile creators and profile readers. In my model the focus is on the profile creator. What is going on with other members is erelvent to their goal. If they should choose to make friends along the way, well then, that is just gravy. The profile creator is in compatition with the other profile creators, athletically and academically. The readers of their profile most likely will not have interaction with the profile creator unless their profile has what the reader wants. So you see the activity stream for all is pointless but the activity stream for friends and or followers are exactly what I want. In my model it is kind of like any sport, you don't share your next play by telling the other team what you are doing. 

Please is the 1.8 version out ? Can i see the features?

@manfred, thanks for the bug report: https://github.com/ewinslow/elgg-followers/issues/7

@kxx4, you can download the BETA (emphasis on BETA) here: http://elgg.org/getelgg.php?forward=elgg-1.8b1.zip

if you use both 'friends' and 'followers'
and you mark both, the data is redundant
so, the rule must be:
if the member is marked as 'following'
and after that
the member is marked as friend
'following' as choice (button) is disabled
and the 'follwing mark' is physically deleted in the table
or with other words
you cannot follow a friend, because it makes no sense ;-)

in that way  'friends' and 'followers' can coexistent
and the handling is simple

for information, i don't want this as a feature
i want only discuss it
so, have a nice sunday :-) 

Fatal error: Call to undefined function elgg_register_event_handler() in ../mod/followers/start.php on line 59

@joriga: this plugin is for Elgg 1.8

@Evan: The Instruction is that it should not be used for production servers. i'll try it out on  my local host