A social networking site mostly depends on ads to generate revenues. We have a failrly strong ethnic community on Gogol (www.globalbengal.com) but need more tools to attract advertisers. Secondly, we need to look at factors that improve stickiness and persistence of members. With that in mind, here are my top 5.

1. Ad Friendliness - Allow much more flexible options (visual editor?) for placing ads anywhere on site - banners, right, left, inside the page columns, full page displays, pre and post see more roll video ads etc. Ideally, this should integrate or be compatible with ad servers such as openx. Once the sites make money, dolphin communities will flourish.

2. Newsfeed - A continuous, personalized news feed on all logins, similar to Facebook or Linkedin. This could for now just be a quick report of new friends joining, friends who connected with others, activities pursued by members in my network, etc.

3. Applications - As mentioned by some here - ability for members to add applications and generate greater value is essential for viral growth of the network. Support for such apps, including publication of API's is important.

4. Mobile Integration - the world is moving towards handhelp devices, where all the IT development will be over the next 5-10 years. In developing economies (Asia), people spend a whole lot more time tinkering with cell phones than they do with computers. Ability to login to the network through their mobiles devices easily and checking status of friends/sending quick messages etc are must haves to differentiate Dolphin networks in the 21st century. I think Friendster or Hi5 was one of the first to recently announce mobile support.

5. Integrate Other Community Profiles - with 200M users in Myspace and an increasing number on Facebook, it is obvious that to get attention span from their users to try out our network, we must make things easier for them. Now, some of these commities are allowing member profiles to be shown on other websites through API integration. One of the problems we've noticed on our site is that more members sign up but few do an Edit profile to provide interesting details about themselves. If my members can have the option to publish their Myspace profiles already created, its less work for them!

I request Boonex to think more deeply along these lines and provide a lasting product for the community. In addition, Boonex could consider starting an ad inventory service from which we could display ads exclusively on Dolphin sites, on a mutually beneficial revenue sharing basis.

Best Regards,

Chitro
www.globalbengal.com