New website milestone: Social networks are ready

The very first stage of social networking infrastructure is ready now on the website.

Users can "add" people to their network on the New Media website now. Once logged in, you can choose who is network. once someone is in your network, you can then go to your profile page and click on "view my network" and there you can see a preview window of the primary blog for each member in your network.

This allows an advisor, for example, to ADD all of the students in his/her advisory to his network. It also allows students to ADD collegues, friends, and project partners to their network. We are building social networks based on the same principles and ideas as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites our students already use.

Then, on one page he/she can preview EVERYONE'S blog at a glance and see who is up to date with their project/assignments/presentations/ etc. that should be present in the blog.