Thoughts on customizing the user profile page? I'm looking to really transform the user profile page for my drupal 7 site and community into something enganging and interative. Perhaps a friends block, list of social media links like fb, linked in, etc as well as to be able to see new posts and comments that that user has contributed to the site.

Certainly we can do better than the default drupal page these days!

What modules do you recommend to start putting together a recipe for a quality and informative user profile experience?

Also, does you have any links for tutorials that would be good resources? Perhaps even a cool profile page you have done as an example.
I think the two key modules for this would be Views and Panels. That should get you most of the way but, depending on what you want to display, you may need some other modules.