Well, here it is. My take on the evolution of social software. With Elgg, as I see it, we are currently in the ELL phase. Perhaps imminent adjustments will move us rapidly ahead.

Some explanation is given in the diagram, but I'll add a bit here, just to make things abundantly clear.

So-called single- and multi-socket events (posts and comments) are events which allow either a list of isolated reactions (single-socket) or a series of connected reactions, one reaction in reaction to the one before, a sort of chain of reactions (multi-socket). To date, as far as I'm aware (and I'm new to all this, so I could be devastatingly wrong in my assessment of the state of the art), only computer mediated conferencing allows chains of reactions, or threads. Blogs tend to isolate reactions, the focus being on the post, not on discussion. Elgg, to my knowledge, acquired over a brief acquaintance, sticks to single-socket post-and-comment clusters. Threads in Elgg consist of stacked posts.

What I envision (and whimsically name a spode) is a system that combines conferences, blogs and community blogs, and allows an event (post or comment) in a conference to also serve as an event in a personal blog and an event in a community blog. All events would be multi-socketed, allowing threads within conferences, blogs and communities.

There would be several advantages to this, in terms of structure, navigation, content and time management.

In terms of structure everything would be (potentially) interlinked. You could go from a conference to my blog to one of my communities, or from my blog to a community to a conference, or from a community to a conference to a blog--or whatever. 

In terms of navigation, you could map, gate or tunnel your way through the network.  Think of the network as a city, corners of which you could access from the air (mapping), ground (gating) or underground (tunneling). Accessing (or entering) from the air would allow selective entry into communities, activities or events of your choice. Accessing from the ground would allow guided entry by way of paths with which you feel comfortable because on them you meet people you know or ecounter placards that entice your interest. Access from below ground would allow random entry, saving you the trouble of looking ahead, perhaps leading to a profitable discovery in some corner you would never have searched had you been forced to decide a course.

In terms of content, contributions to conferences, personal blogs and community blogs would increase and tend to be richer, because contributors would be able to invest more time in fewer events while participating in more activities.

Some of the benefits I've mentioned here are reached at by certain features of ELLs, such as weighted lists of topics, lists of friends, display of community blog entries in pesonal blogs and of all public- or logged-on-user restricted blogs on an all-posts page that appears at first access to the site. I doubt that any possibilities represented by the spode model are currently out of reach. I for one would love to see and participate in such a system. Perhaps becoming such a system is the destiny of Elgg.