For a while the main Joomla! social networking plugin was Community Builder, which we've used for a large Joomla-based social network. CB is ok but fell short in some areas, and it was necessary to stitch together a number of other plugins to get a full SNS featureset. However, JomSocial was just released today (by Azrul, the makers of JomComment and other fine components) and looks to be a strong viable alternative to CB for building an open source social network. We're looking forward to working with JomSocial in the coming months and will relate our experiences as we get more in-depth. In the meantime, if you're looking to build an open source social network or add social media capabilities to your existing Joomla! site, feel free to contact us.

Elgg announced version 1.1 about a week ago. We looked at Elgg a while back when it was young and a bit more education-centric, but it has matured into an open source platform with a good adherence to standards such as OpenSocial and OpenID, as well as an API. Feature-wise it still falls behind some other platforms like phpFox, Handshakes, or Dolphin, but the price is good and the look is clean.

Tired of iPhone correcting your IM abbreviations and other words? Two ways to do it:

Retype it a few times

Tip: if you retype something twice, it'll stop autocorrecting it. E.g. if you try to send "np" as an SMS to someone, iPhone will autocorrect that to "no." So hit the delete key to erase the "corrected" word & retype it again. The iPhone will autocorrect it again, so delete it one more type & retype it, and it will stay. Third time's the charm. Plus, next time the iPhone won't autocorrect it at all, since it is now in the dictionary.

Note that sometimes I had to do the "third time's the charm" tactic twice before an unusual word would stay in the iPhone's dictionary & not get autocorrected anymore.

Click the Suggested Word Box

You can also click the "suggested word" box (anywhere in it, not just the X) to prevent the autocomplete and add the word to the dictionary.