Its all gone a bit social
 

Unless you have been in a cave for the last 5 years you will have probably notice the whole social networking thing. There is also an un-said opinion that forums are, to some degree, old tech and the conversations that people were having on forums 10 years ago are now happening on facetwittertubeplusspace. To mitigate this I know have the following "social" options available to me:

• Facebook login
• Facebook likes
• Facebook publishing of threads, posts, blogs, articles etc
• Likes system (vbseo)
• Tweetboard (vbseo)
• Google+ (custom mod)
• VB Social Bookmarking
• VB Social Bookmarking (vbseo)
• Probably something else I have forgotten about

My question is, how do you guys manage the combination of these things on your forums? For the reasons mentioned above I am keen to integrate with the social sites - however I am also keen to avoid plastering my site with a kaleidoscope of like buttons.

Then there is another question, like all things in forum administration there is a balancing act, enable FB, disable twitter - FB users happy, twitter users not so happy. Enabled everything and have the kaleidoscope, disabled everything are slowly die a social death.

So, what do you have enabled? Do your members make use of them?

social networks won't replace a forum in the near future.
They do replace old-fashioned messengers like msn, icq and the like as well as irc maybe, but as a whole they were filling a void rather than advancing what was already there.
Forums are good for collecting information and bringing it in an order.
Social networking are more focused to short conversations, sharing of opinions, media, etc. It's unordered and will be forgotten after 48 hours.

Facebook login is a good way to catch additional users, who are lazy or to collect more users who wouldn't have used the forum with a conventional login. Maybe useless imho, doesn't really offer enough benefits to be really useful.

The like functionality is good for making your forum known throughout the social networks. Same for the publishing method. It just looks better than someone posting a link somewhere.

I myself don't use any of that stuff atm, but that's because I mainly administrate support forums where it's focused about topics and help within an productive community, not that chit-chat kind of thing.
Use it if you feel your community may benefit from it, not if you only want to have it and brag about it.

With some user profile fields and a little coding you can set it up so each user could enable or disable whatever "share" options they want.

On my form I have my users the option of disabling all of them since I know many never use social networking and never will.

That is an excellent idea

actually social networks has lot of people, but they do not share knowledge,
its kinda time kill, forums are always knowledgeable

Oh I absolutely hate social networking. Only 5% of people actually use it for something worth the while, while the rest only kill time. I am probably the only one in my area not to have a Facebook account.

James Taylor: ++++ Facebook!

I prefer twitter over facebook when it comes to social networking.