I just finished reading your book through the weekend and went throught the examples, really good stuff. The only missing area now is how to put it all together and deploy a complete (at least what you think of as complete) version of a social network.

Maybe just an example of the steps that need to be taken to implement the different aspects of a SN. The examples in the book are great, but I'm having a problem imagining how to start a design of the site and how the clients would navigate to the different areas. Any help here would be appreciated - may be there are aricles out there already, but i searched the Net for at aleast 2 hours and I could not find anything that is specific to SN.

Regards,
-Sam

I find that every organization wants something different when it comes to social software. However, some common threads run throughout - the ability to tag content is important b/c helps to inform the user base about how content is really used. Commenting is great on publishing pages but the ability to add comments to documents is also really a great capability as most organizations struggle to get past using SharePoint as an online file cabinet.

I'd start by building the application outward from the individual person. Build a My Site which lets the person talk about themselves and expose information to the public. Next, make sure their destination site on the intranet can track the information they're interested in by allowing it to search across your sites (and site collections) for tags and activities of certain interesting individuals.

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Matt Ranlett
http://www.devcow.com
http://www.sharepointguys.com