We've worked hard to get NextBillion.net up and running. For this post I want to feature the user profile page customizations. If you go to www.nextbillion.net/profile you can see the user profiles listing. If you are signed into the site you will see private messenger and add-to-buddylist on this listing to let you quickly contact another user. A partial inspiration for this work are the profile pages over here at http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/francisraven which is based on zope/plone, for example. In Drupal, I like the way you can tab over to the 'track' tab to see latest posts, and then identify the type of post and awaiting comments in the table view of the tracker module. Check it out here: http://www.nextbillion.net/user/17. With 'track' data in a tab (default display in 4.5), it keeps the main profile page nice and tidy as compared to the digitaldivide.net example.

A lot of the technical ideas came from this post over at Drupal: http://drupal.org/node/14466. Eric and I were discussing yesterday the potential for Drupal to support social networking to the level of Friendster. Take organic groups for example - on individual user profile pages you could have it so that people's group affiliations were shown. What about leaving a shout out or testimonial? And showing the degrees of connection?