Social Networking is a broad term that can mean different things to different people.  Instead of talking about Social Networking, let's instead talk about specific social features that people want and which provide value to sites both large and small.

1. Taxonomy - This is the ability to group items into pre-defined, heirarchical categories to create relationships between various pieces of site content.  Taxonomies provide natural navigation structure to data elements.  Taxonomies naturally occur in blogs, forums and even sitemaps.

2. Folksonomy - This is the ability to provide ad-hoc, user generated, linkages between various pieces of data.  Because folksonomies are more organic, they tend to be easier for people to search since the terms are user generated rather than being pre-defined.  Folksonomies also help to uncover hidden relationships between various pieces of site content that might otherwise remain hidden.

3. Comments - The ability for people to make comments on a piece of content allows conversations to form in the context of the data that is being discussed.  So instead of searching for a particular forum to build a discussion around a topic, you could do so inline with the particular item being discussed.

4. Rating - Ratings provide a qualitative measure of some site element and aid visitors by allowing them to get a snapshot piece of data which is easily digested.  Where comments are useful for deep understanding, ratings are useful for making the initial decision whether to spend time reading comments.

5. Ranking - Unlike Ratings which are made in a vacuum, where each users prior experiences may sway their ratings, rankings provide natural context that helps resolve issues like "grade inflation".

6. Sharing - This capability allows users to selectively provide content to members of their social graph or to even open that data up to a broader audience. Sharing is one of the primary means of bringing new, user generated content into a site or linking to content which may exist on other sites.

7. Social Graph - The social graph provides a means to enable users to form relationships.  For many sites, these relationships provide means whereby content is shared or business is conducted.  In some implementations, social graphs when combined with other social networking capabilities provide the human portion of the equation which can become extremely valuable. 

Different sites will want to be able to use different portions of social networking features.  Some have simple requirements like taxonomies (this already occurs in a simple form on every DNN site since the page structure forms a natural taxonomy).  Others might want to allow users to leave comments or ratings for elements on the site - this is especially valuable in ecommerce sites.  Still others will want to have comments and folksonomies because they make heavy use of blogs  Others, which are about community building, will want the ability to have social graphs.

While all of the capabilities currently exist in one or more modules they are all created independently.  The true power can be seen when everyone is using a common API to store and retrieve these elements.  An ecommerce site that allows tagging of products can now allow users to naturally link from a product to a blog which may be talking about a competing product, or that may be talking about a general topic.  The module that runs the ecommerce portion of the site may not know anything about the blog module and vice-versa, but because they are using the same underlying APIs a linkage can naturally occur.  This is just one of thousands of scenarios where adding social networking features can be useful for sites both big and small.

Joe's post covers the tool-side of the social networking sites well, but I think this can be expanded with a look at what social network sites and technology actually does.

Originally, the model for web publishing closely mimicked the old newspaper/magazine style publishing.  A central location collated, wrote and edited the content, then published it on a periodic basis.  Early websites all used this model, principally because the tools and technology for frequent pubishing weren't widely available.

What 'web 2.0' (and I don't like the term, but it is useful) brings is a closer fit between the technology and the natural model of communication : that is, a peer-to-peer, more informally driven style that dominates all communication the world over.  The only time we edit, refine and deliver in a formal style is doing speeches at weddings, conferences and board meetings.  The rest of the time we make connections, share information and discuss things in an informal way.  This is why email over all over internet protocols immediately took off : the technology suited the means of communication better.  Social networking technologies are merely bringing internet publishing closer to a natural communication mechanism.  So the question of 'why social networking' should really be turned around and said : is there any reason why we shouldn't be using these tools on a site?  If you're creating an internal intranet, these technologies are infinitely useful to eliminate bottlenecks between employee communication, but all the time capturing the dialogue as a knowledgebase.  Think of all the corporate knowledge developed and discussed but lost forever in email archives : this would all been better off as a searchable set of blog posts, twitter-style conversations and forums.  The same could be said about just about any medium : think of how much benefit is gained from google searches on forum question/answers posted : even when the posts are years old. 

From another angle, the original post looks at the world in a hit-driven, 'number 1 or bust' viewpoint.  If you want to capture the general-purpose-find-everyone-show-photos market, that ship has sailed.  But if you want to develop a niche network on a particular topic, the variety of communities yet to be formed is infinite as the variety of ways people like to spend their time.  There are limitless groups of people who want to connect around a particular passion and share information in a way that only technology can enable.  Pokerdir.com is but one example; I could probably name 20 different ideas in 10 minutes where social networking is a good fit.  The previously mentioned scouts example is a good one.

Oh, and for the record, it's my understanding that the author of the smart social modules principally wanted to open up the development so he could concentrate on other priorities rather than spend all his time on support.  The market in commercial DNN modules is healthy where the right price/performance/value combination has been hit.

Hi Salama. I am thinking about trying to set up a free trial offer to access the gold membership for a short period of time in my website using the social network module on DNN, like, free gold membership for 7 days. Or develop a game strategy that if a member wins a prize that you offer, he or she will get his or her hard-earned prize that he won. I am thinking of another strategy to drive more traffic to my site.