So, one of the things that I decided that I needed to do when I left my job to focus on Unity Developer Magazine was to put a little emphasis on social networking… since I’m no longer in an office environment, and since I have a habit of getting absorbed in what I’m doing, I thought that I needed to make it a bigger priority.
I’ve started using LinkedIn again – an account that had pretty much sat unused (I tend to do that). If anyone is interested, my profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshinshaw If you have an account, you could add me to your network and we could… well, network socially, I guess. 
Also, if anyone can recommend any similar sites, please do so.
On the other sites thing:
Theres a unity facebook group.
Are you considering social networking to drive sales of Unity Developer Mag?
It might be interesting to create a facebook plugin for your website that Facebook users could use within their profiles.
Not directly, but that is a good idea.
I started using LinkedIn again to add people from my old job so that I could stay in touch. I was just looking at what I had done for the last few weeks and I realized that I’ve mostly just sat in my apartment listening to music and working. I’ll meet friends at a bar for a drink in the evening, but I’m actively trying to not talking about things there (get into a discussion about Quaternions at a bar and see how many people want to talk with you). I figured that I should probably look for “new” connections too.
I’m probably highjacking this thread a bit, but I found it tricky to find the Unity facebook site. It’s here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2229228774
Also, that is one of the most barren pages for a group I have ever seen. 
Yeah. It took me a while too. There are a lot of groups with “Unity” in the name, and “3D” didn’t work.
Only one of the most? You’ve seen equal to or more barren?
You know… it’s true. It actually IS the most barren I’ve ever seen. 
While we are hijacking, I have a facebook page for a short sci-fi film I helped create. I made a separate thread for it though: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=11779
I’m pretty new to the social networking stuff, but I’m liking Facebook.
A social networking site that is actually developing Unity-based content: Sosauce
(In the interest of disclosure, yes, I do work for them.)
A site focused on the unity community which doesn’t run in safari? Pardon my french, but I’ll be back when it does
That aside, I’m ashamed to not have first mentioned the irc who’s who site: http://unity.dynamichead.net/
Charles, Have you thought about implementing some social networking of your own on the unity mag website? Content management systems like drupal make it easy to plug in blog’s, articles, forums, personal account, friends lists, rankings, etc.
A place on your website to discuss topics of the latest issue would be great. Maybe “pushing” experts (or the people you interviewed for the article) to create an account would be a good idea.
-Josh
A. Parr had an interesting bit of insight on the dearth of posts on facebook, which was that it seems these forums are the community.
If you think about it, he’s prolly correct. Why have 2 or 3 networking sites when 1 will do?
It seems like the best “social networking site” for Unity is er … this forum. I guess a Unity group on Facebook might help attract new people to Unity. (I think Unity games on Facebook would probably do more tho’.)
Well it seems that what people are requesting is a more diverse community centre. The forum should definitely be at the core of any community site for this particular community as it offers the most critical feature we need: Communication.
From this community have spawned the irc channel, a facebook group and now a linkedin group. To me this sounds like the forum is lacking some features - namely more complex profiles, social networking and live chat.
I don’t see why it should not be possible to bind these into the forum in its current form or why it shouldn’t. After all the very name of unity and the use of the application reflects how important user to user interaction is to the people using it.
phew that was a long chunk of talk.
What I’m saying is it should be relatively simple to extend the forum by adding links to facebook and linkedin profiles right next to the “pm”, “profile” and various IM buttons below each post. Just as it would be fairly trivial to make a link in the forum navbar to the irc channel - both in the form of an url which will be caught by most irc clients and a link to an on-site java IRC client.
In general it shouldn’t be too hard to link from the forum to the various other community services to which the unity community has spread.
Oh and how about that long overdue link to the wiki? I’m accessing it through bookmarks and I know it is linked from the support section of unity3d.com, but it would be immensely easier if it was linked from the forum.
Woow that was a lot of text. Getting dangerously close to a Jashan length post here . I’ll stop rambling now.
yeah, I totally agree. I like the simplicity of design the unity website has, but they could expand it a little bit. More indepth forum profiles that expanded to be linked to any item we edit in the wiki, etc.
And maybe I’ve just missed it, but a place to post pre-made code solutions for certain effects and what not would be great. Kind of like a Tutorial template page with upload ability.
-Josh
There are lots of things that are needed that are relatively simple, but then we suffer death due to a thousand pin pricks. We’re crafting a plan to do a host of forum updates (ideally, this summer some time) and so I’ve logged these on my list of suggestions.
Isn’t that what the Unify Community Wiki is for? Please note that I’m also thinking about how we might open the Resources area on our website to 3rd party developer submissions. Doing that would require some sort of review and approval process as we don’t want to post untested/unverified code on our website, and we might want to avoid too much clutter with duplicate examples and whatnot. So for now it seems the wiki is what you want with that and longer term we’ll keep seeing how we can (smartly) integrate community efforts with our own.
Great! Thanks! That is all I ask
You might take a look at http://twitter.com it is based on a very simple concept where you can follow people and get notified about what they are doing. Its a simple way to stay connected with small text updates (up to 140 characters).
As long as it supports rss feeds. You should always make it so that notification “blogs” and news events get sent to rss.
-Josh
Tom is collecting unity blogs. I believe he is working on some system to easily browse them from unity3d.com