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Vbulletin 3.7 Social Networking Predictions
As many of you know, Vbulletin is working on their latest major release of their product, version 3.7. This project has been in the works for a while, and this version is supposed to focus heavily on social networking.
Everything that follows in this post is purely theoretical speculation. Some of these things are based on facts, others are just what I think is practical. If I say something stated as fact after this point, it isn’t - it’s just my thoughts. Please keep that in mind. :p
Release Date
Kier, from vbulletin.com, recently said that All will be reveled very soon. How soon? Well, a user took his guess.
“My guess is this year is the beta/rc year. Stable will be out next year I would imagine.”
width=”450px” The vbulletin response? Well, surprisingly enough, there was one this time. Kier responded by saying it will be out “sooner than that.” So, in effect, we can expect the stable version of 3.7 to be out before January 1st, 2007.
Regarding the vbulletin blog addon, a license holder asked when the next version of the blog would be, then soon stated that 3.7 must be in it’s “final stages.”
Freddie Bingham’s reply was that it was.
While the final reply doesn’t help us in guessing a date, it does reinforce the fact that it’s nearly finished.
I think a reasonable estimates would be as follows:
11/18-24/2007 - Vbulletin begins running 3.7 on it’s own site
11/26-30/2007 - Vbulletin release private beta version (if it has not already)
11/9-13/2007 - Vbulletin releases a stable version of 3.7 to public buyers.
Again, these are only estimates. However, at this point I feel confident that each release will be within one week (plus or minus) the estimate I gave.
Features
When the vbulletin blog first came out, I bought it right away. I was slightly disappointed - it didn’t have many features that standard blogs have (such as tags, customizable look change, customizable blocks, etc). However, many of the things the first version of the blog was missing are promised in the next major version, which should soon follow the release of 3.7.
My fear at the moment is that vbulletin will rush their release and give us a watered-down version of 3.7 like they did with the blog.
A screenshot was (accidentally?) published several months ago. I feel confident they’ve passed this stage, but I hope it’s a lot better than what we’ve seen so far:
Based on this screenshot we can determine we should have a “about user block” which contains contact information, etc, as well “about me” section and sections for easy access to the blog and forum posts. We can also see the beginnings of a comment box that can be used for users to leave comments for each other (like with myspace).
Additional probably features I think are practical to be released are as follows:
- Potential invite friends capabilities
- “Top Friends” or “Most Recent Friends” list
- Potential song or video clip area (though this might be stretching it)
- Better displaying of custom profile fields (i.e., interests, religion, political views, etc)
- Mood feature
- Basic image gallery features. I anticipate users being able to upload about five different pictures - NOT like an image gallery.
Again, most of these are only guesses. I left out several features I would like to see simply because I don’t think we’ll see them until vbulletin 4.0.
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