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The Sixty One (http://thesixytone.com) has a points/karma update where it pop up up a small AJAX window at the lower right hand corner of the screen. That\'s something I would like to replicate

There is a Karma plugin in the Subversion right now. It basically listens to the events thrown by the social engine, extensions, and applications and adds and subtracts a person\'s points according to a lookup table provided by the social engine, extension, or application.

It is not finished yet, but it will be once we deploy our client\'s project.

My 2 cents, we have userpoints with Jomsocial but no way to use them so it\'s actually frustrating, as a webmaster, to have them at all. If serious about collecting userpoints, I think it\'s important to plan ways to dispense them as well. (Don\'t say that we\'ll do it later...) I think it needs to be part of the overall planning.

Socialables.com is working on a Gifts system for Jomsocial that\'s very attractive.

@cyndy +1

having a feature for the sake of having it won\'t work. A currency has to have a value before people start collecting it.

@cindy/rastin

absolutely!

imho such a \"user points\"/currency feature is a key feature for most community projects. the guys at www.nordmograph.com have developed a plugin where you can pay your VirtueMart order with JomSocial or Alpha User Points. this is definitely a step in the right direction.

I would love to see such a currency system with Anahita Social Engine.

But then we would also have to have Virtuemart installed. That\'s what I mean when I say that AUP is very complicated. There are so many things to install, from various developers.

And, since I have a large ZenCart shop already... why do I want Virtuemart too? And I don\'t really want to \"sell\" my items for userpoints. I\'d rather have real cash. I\'m not into giving out a lot of freebies. Unless it\'s little items I don\'t want anyway such as the miniature bubblebath squirt guns. :)

I\'m just saying all that to throw in another perspective. I do like the \"gifts\" idea. It\'s the typical Facebook app where they waste a lot of time on silly stuff and enjoy doing it.

Yeah, that might be an approach. But for my purpose this gift stuff is much to childish. It has no \"real\" value (in contrast to e.g. mp3 or stockphotos etc.). It\'s just virtual goods with no use. just playing around, wasting time... (my opinion).

I think there should be 2 extensions/plugins/applications.

- one for the gift stuff, maybe something like a simple gift shop where admins can create gifts in categories

- one as a plugin for the most common e-commerce platforms/components like virtuemart, magento etc... for us it would make a great sense to barter Anahita User Points for e.g. Magento products (virtual or real products). whoop! that would rock the community!

best regards!

Giving away mp3 or stockphotos is a lot different than giving away actual goods and paying postage to send them. Shipping is so expensive now it\'s criminal. I don\'t even want to think about it. And I have to mark my stuff so cheap in order to sell it (especially in the current economy), there\'s no margin for coupon discounts. I can\'t see any way to come out ahead, converting userpoints to currency. It\'s actually a scary thought.

Yes, I agree that the \"gifts\" idea is a bunch of monkey business. It\'s not the kind of thing that impresses me either, but in collectors clubs or teen groups it does go over and they get a kick out of it. I\'ve noticed that adults are more inclined to do Gifts if the graphics are especially pretty.

Interesting . . . . the way we've been thinking about developing a points system wasn't to allow users to garner gifts or goods, but to garner access to special groups, or to have more features, or to have a voice in what functionality gets prioritized as the application expands. Perhaps most importantly, the points give other users a sense of who they are dealing with, potential expert or someone not to be taken too seriously.

We are actually seriously considering a point system which can be used as the Anahitapolis currency. When people contribute in different ways they'll be earning points which can be spend towards extending their membership time. That way members who are active contributors don't have to pay full membership fees.

I also think people should be able to donate their points to other members or new members too.

This is how I'm interested in using points:
http://publishing2.com/2007/08/16/the-huffington-post-allows-top-commenters-to-become-bloggers/

Driving quality interaction and having the host site's editors acknowledge higher quality on top frequency of posting and having other posters follow you or rate your posts as high.

A points/credit system has to be apart of Anahita in one form or another, but should really have some base level gaming component behind it. For example with Gowalla and Foursquare a location-based applications which rewards users when they complete a task. A very good example is a case study and social media campaign executed by Vaynermedia using Gowalla and New Jersey Nets.

Virtual gifts (Game tickets) were left in locations (geo-location) and picked up by users of Gowalla and redeemed on game day.

Facebook recently joined up with Zynga which I believe will be the launch platform for Facebook Credits within Zynga games.

hey Dale, I'll agree with you about the gaming behind this, as in foursquare as gowalla indeed is like you advancing levels, unblocking cityes, ecc. Its quite a viral and nice thing in their system, my only concern is that this approach is perfectly suited for them and is something that bring them standing apart, but as anahita is a social network framework that should have broader and more generic usage i am not sure how to implement such a thing in this way.

I personally have studied the social graph theories and concepts in depth while we were designing and experiemtning such a generic system with the folks at beyounic almost 2 years ago based on this:

shortly: We have nodes and links in the graph, (stories travel from node to node across links). We can say that links can be weaker or stronger (follower, leader, mutual) as starting point (normally you weight the link also by the time a node rely on it, etc and also nodes with more strong links can be of more relavanc ein the graph, etc..). Then we have stories, this occours when somekind of action is taken, and i think is like on foursquare when i unblock a new city or i am the first to check in, or whatsoever, after i write here on the discussions, after i follow somebody and so on, in other words stories are then nothing more then points(when a story is writtend and propagated is when the points get rewarded).

If we then insert a weighting system inside link of the graph, and define points for type of story we get a primitive but genery social graph point system. Then applications or implementation of the anahta framwork can be used in different ways depending on what you want to achieve, design and what is your social app project.

This si not just personal, as we are talking about social graph theories, means that the more links the network has (and thereefore the lower the degree of separation is) and the more powerfull and healthy the netowrk is. Inf act the total total sum of points in the system can tell you something about the netowrk itself too.

I have many indepths thoughst about this things from all of our studies at beyounic back in those years, if anyone is interesting we can carry on the conversation, but i really would love to hear from you guys, what you think?

@rastin - giving (donating) points to other may generate more points again in such a system depending on the implementation, I personally think i will separate points from credits as points are more about the value of anode itself. I therefore think that the actual karma plugin listening to events is a good start.

More studies needs to be done in this directions and experiemnts too, but i think that enabling point and weight inside a graph is not just about buying credits or virtual goods, or whatsoever, is in fact muuch muuch more, is in fact putting mathematics inside networks and i think this would provide a huge amount of interesting data to be studied...