Just in time for Spring or Autumn, bbPress 2.0, the long awaited forum plugin for WordPress, has been released.
bbPress is Automattic’s solution to build a community around forums, but if you want to build your community around a social network, the new BuddyPress 1.5 was also released.
I once asked openly on Twitter what was the main difference between a social network and forums, and maybe the best answer was the one provided by Ismael Briasco, founder of PsicoFXP, a large community in Argentina built around forums, and it was that users gathered in forums do so due to a mutual interest in a topic. In forums, the topics about what can be discussed are already established. In social networks topics about what can be discussed are not established, and friend connections are not exclusively based on a certain interest about one topic.
What do you think?
