Also if i followed the link article code correctly it never broadcast the generated activity to that user’s colleagues. It would only show on that persons profile feed (Published Feed) and not on their colleagues (Consolidated Feed) feed on the newsfeed page.

This ‘gatherer’ approach is taken from the pattern the native timerjobs use, if you break out your favourite decompiler and trace through the timerjobs you’ll see the gatherers.

Yeah I’ve done a lot of work on this particular implementation and you can create something very complex without those third party products. Chris O’Brien recently wrote an article about these features from our project http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2012/03/extending-sharepoint-2010-social.html

You will struggle to create them using only the native API’s as they don’t really support the complexity required to provide the comment and republishing of the comments to colleagues.

We architected our likes, comments and subscriptions into a custom Service Application and associated database to provide the data store.

Anything specific to only that user is best held in thier personal MySite, but beware that the update and governance aspects need considerations once you start having an instance per person. For example what happens if you wanted to add a column and have 50,000 users…. these types of things are easy enough to do, but consider them while making you choice.

Lync as well as Outlook are used to provide colleague suggestions.

SharePoint Server proactively suggests colleagues and displays them in a Suggested Colleagues web part on a user’s My Site. It does this through a number of different features.

The user’s Communicator or Lync contacts are examined and are collected from the Communicator client via the ActiveX control (name.dll) for colleague suggestions.

The SharePoint Server Colleague Add-In in Microsoft Outlook 2010 scans the user’s Sent Items folder periodically (every 5 days or so, depending on usage) to look for names and keywords along with the frequency of those names and keywords. The list of possible colleagues is updated periodically and stored under the user’s profile on the user’s local computer. This list is accessed by the Add Colleagues page on a user’s SharePoint My Site through an ActiveX control when you click Suggested colleagues where they can choose the colleagues they want to add to their My Site. The user can approve or reject contact names before they are added. Outlook 2007 supports this functionality but is not as extensive in searching for colleagues.

Although you can enable e-mail analysis for all users in Outlook or only for specific groups by using Group Policy, users can opt out of this feature. If e-mail analysis is disabled for all users, individual users can still opt in. Also, you can choose not to install the add-in as part of the Office install. More information about configuring the add-in can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff384821.aspx.