With WordPress now powering 14.7 million sites, or nearly 15 percent of the entire web, including CNN, The New York Times and Lance Armstrong's LIVESTRONG foundation (http://blog.livestrong.org), many site users and visitors have already become familiar with its native functions, even if they don't know what they're called. WordPress ships with three core functions, or capabilities that are native to the application, which allow your users and consumers to establish a dialog, based on the data that is provided. They include the following:
content syndication
content update services
a commenting system
It's easy to gloss over these basic features, as they have been part of the Content Management System (CMS) for a long time. There is a natural tendency to view social media as the lump sum of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. The expectation is that photo tagging, @mentioning, or group discussions are the key to driving social interactions online. However, the main distinction is that they are generally the key once site have garnered repeat site vistors who actively community engage with the site.
Three key players of the tech world—Google, Apple Inc, and Microsoft, thought of seemingly brilliant ideas until they were lambasted as major flops. They included Google Wave, Ping, and the Zune. None of these projects were detrimental to the continued success of their respective companies.
WordPress has a similar weakness. Because of the sheer amount of extensions that are available to you, it's a simple system that you can make very bulky and complicated within a few mouse clicks. It's easy to get lost in a pool of plugins, because each one sounds better than the next, and with the web running at warp speed, it would seem beneficial to activate them all as soon as you can get your hands on them. However, a comment rating plugin, for example, isn't going to do much if hardly anybody leaves comments. A Real Simple Syndication(RSS) subscriber counter will look sad if only five people are subscribed to your site. You have to excel at the basics first to see your content thrive just like you need to have a firm understanding of WordPress before activating countless plugins