I know you don’t all have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen listening to an old windbag go on about stuff you most likely already know so if you want to know the basic ingredients for setting up your own social network system, just ask me, as I would be only too happy to give you my opinion.

I don’t know what happens at your place in cases like this, but sometimes when I am next door or out in the yard, certain high ranking staff members who will remain anonymous (for now) who have access to the kitchen leave their cups and saucers on the table, spilt sugar on the bench and more often than not leave their tea bags still stuck in the teaspoon with wound around cotton, and sitting right at the edge of the counter with the trash bin right there!, its frightful.

No accountability.

And when you ask who did it, no one knows, I know it isn’t the kids from the coding department because none of them have a key for the kitchen.

If you’re wondering what I am getting to here is extremely clever because as you know there are directors, executives, managers and workers in a business hierarchy and they are all accountable to the one above, it is just the same structure in a social network too and these clever little sods here at netvillage have built exactly that.

Multiple levels of access to almost every facet of the community that can be granted or declined at will by the level above.

Now you might be thinking that this access is denoted in big chunks, such as being able to use this feature or that feature, well its not, so let me just put the kettle on here and we can start to consider some of the finer things these levels of membership access can really do (you can get the details on social networking administration here)

For example, access levels can be so small yet complex that if describing them in a way of what you can get from the tea lady and what you can’t get from her (I mean me), it would sound like this.

They can let someone have coffee and or tea, or just coffee on Tuesdays and Fridays and doughnuts only every second Friday.

Or they can let one of the little sods upstairs have cream on a Monday morning, cream on Tuesday afternoon and a thick ear on Friday at 3:00 PM ha ha ha.

He’s the tea bag in the tea spoon one!

So you see it is extremely clever and makes the system so exciting and suited to every one looking for a clever social networking system.

In my next letter I’ll write about community currency and how members can get points or credits for performing activities in the community and you will start to see how that, and what I am writing about here go together.

Think about a community as a great big layer cake, it takes a lot of ingredients to make it just absolutely delicious, but after the main 2 ingredients have been whipped together (butter and sugar), you know, when you can start to taste it off your finger, well its just the same when it comes to communities, only the butter and sugar the currency and the hierarchy.

But you still whip them together of sorts ha ha ha.

Some things that you can use the access levels for:

  • When someone registers they generally have the lowest access level.
  • Read email, send email, go to public chat rooms etc. 

And as for the accountability bit like the tea bag left in the spoon, well they have also built in a thingy that lets you track every member wherever they are or where they have been in the system, isn’t it amazing, if only there was something like this in real life ha ha ha we’d know who the good and bad politicians really are.