This could be solved by something like Google Plus, if circles could be defined by topics that people subscribe to rather than by people you want to send a message to.

e.g.: I want to know what Jim thinks about coding, but not politics

What you describe sounds like the existing Communities feature, but until there is code block formatting in posts it'll still be a pain to read code in G+

That's why we've built http://DoerHub.com . We have hackers, entrepreneurs, surgeons, PhDs, and doers of all kinds posting and contributing to projects. The purpose of the site is to enable everyone to share what they are working on and grow it with help from others who care about the same topic (teammates, advisors, beta users, feedback, single-task contributors, word of mouth, you name it ). You can already message anyone, but we're adding group chat and anything else doers request that makes collaboration easier. You can just connect with GitHub.

I'm part of a huge Facebook-group (maybe 2000 members) with only programmers in my city. It's really great and the only thing that I like and enjoy about Facebook nowadays.

I'm a part of a similar thing, except for high schoolers. ~700 members and it's easily become my favorite part of Facebook.

I think GitHub is in a strong position to do this. They can easily turn it into something more social that allows you to add friends and share codes in your feed.

Github already let's you follow people, and has something vaguely akin to a feed to track followed users and watched repos

Dude. I've often thought about doing exactly this, but I felt like there was probably something already out there and just haven't taken the time to research whether that's true or not. If there's not, and there still isn't by the time I finish launching my current project, I might just look into taking this on next!

I built something like this about 4 years ago called BigStartups.com. It was built to help network the startup community and was moderately successful. Unfortunately, there were co-founder issues and we shut it down. I often think about what it could be in todays world if we kept working on it. Oh well...

https://gitter.im/ ?

This looks really cool :D

This sounds like something, that if it started to gain traction, could be replicated by Github almost instantly.

Really I just want github to implement that functionality, rather than make an entire new site.

http://www.coderwall.com seems similar to that.

Could these features be added to Github via browser plugin? (I really don't know)

Only dead trees there. It used to be a great place, but after it got acquired, acquired, sold and then acquired again, all of the community was long gone. It had its peek under Kyle Bragger when he was actually running a community with staff full-time on it, but after he sold it, it went downhill. Fast.

There's some recent attempts to bring back the community and improve all sorts of things, but it's just renovating and feeding a rotten tree. Sure, it will live for a long time but it will never be as beautiful as a real living tree fed by nature.

Facebook Groups work well for this for me. Twitter too. And IRC...

Geeklist, Coderwall, Github, sub groups on FB/Twitter

https://geekli.st is trying to be that.

Geekli.st is "social network" for tech recruiters.

koding.com

It's called Github

As I said at the end of the first paragraph:

>So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in.

So Facebook. :) How about limiting the audience of your Facebook posts to a list of developer friends?