About a week ago, I posted a description of Azrul's new extension for social networking, JomSocial.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in evaluating this important new extension to go to the JomSocial dev site and register to obtain a test user account.

This extension is being developed in an extremely thorough and professional fashion. On the dev site, you will find information about the online polling system that has been set up for test users. The thousand or so JomSocial test users are contribution suggestions for refinements/enhancements using the online polling system -- there are several  dozen recommendations to date -- and other test users vote and/or comment on those suggestions. Here are a few that I found particularly worthwhile, and that I have voted for:

• "karma points" - JomSocial has a system for reflecting how much individuals contribute to community activity. There is an active discussion in process about how to make "karma points" functionality as robust as possible.
• interaction w/other networks - will JomSocial networks talk to each other? Will they talk to other networks, such as Facebook?
• SEO - there seems to be pretty strong agreement that JomSocial should have good SEO support

I even contributed a suggestion of my own: include functionality that helps users of JomSocial find each other in the real world -- in other words, support for location parameter(s) in profiles.

In the weeks and months ahead, we at Arc expect to be actively engaged in helping our clients put JomSocial to work for them! (Do you want to be one of them?)

For more on JomSocial, see the main JomSocial page on this site.