In previous posts, we discussed two upcoming Rails social networking how-to books, “Railspace” and “Practical Social Networking on Rails”, which we’ll review as soon as it arrives on our doorstep. We also discussed the many available social networking open source platforms for PHP developers, including PHPIzabi.net, Vastal’s ambitious mySpace and Youtube clones and Consummating.com’s open source version of its popular social app. Yet, the missing link in all of this is a social networking platform for Rails. A CMS that encompasses peer-to-peer relationships, add-as-a-friend and other defacto social features. Even if Rails helps you deploy more quickly when compared to PHP, you may be slower to market in the long run if social networking platforms come readymade (and free) off the shelf. Instead of building from scratch you’d work your way out to customize the product for your needs.
On the other hand, while there isn’t a complete Rails social CMS, Rails does have the majority of plugins needed to quickly deploy a social application. In this repository alone, there is a ton of great plugins, many like make ratable, commentable, google Maps are perfect for a community site. While I’ve yet to see an all-in-one Rails social platform, there are enough plugins and successful rails social sites (YFly, Curbly, Twittr) to use as inspiration. There’s also good advice out there (in this case by the makers of Curbly and YFly) To see more, visit “plugins” on the blogroll.
Categories: Ruby on Rails & Development
A big piece in the NYTimes about social going mobile. Social is spreading even faster than initially thought. Only in its early stages of maturity, it has already leap frogged into mobile – and in a big way. I’m feeling that Helio Ocean, which was designed with mobile social (with myspace in particular) in mind. As WAP 2.0 becomes the defacto platform, smart developers will be popping out of the woodwork to develop new, exciting mobile destinations using common XHTML. Not a place to make instant revenue, but a place for dreamers to catch like wildfire and be bought into google’s ecosystem. Twittr, a Rails application, is the first to be widely addictive in a way that Dodgeball, Socialight and others haven’t yet figured out. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/technology/30social.html?ref=business
Categories: Future of Social Media
Out of nowhere comes ShopText, an incubated startlet recently spun off from its creators at Gotham agency Anomoly. Helmed by Mark Kaplan, ShopText’s first steps out of the womb involved working with eBay to develop mobile shopping tools. Having learned a thing or two from eBay, and perhaps seeing that magical golden lightbulb of opportunity, Anomoly spun ShopText into its own company. Beneath the radar, ShopText is now starting to catch buzz because of a recent NYTimes article profiling their company. According to CEO Mark Kaplan, ShopText has just discovered another planet, and it has water.
Categories: Future of Social Media
There’s regular, “old fashioned” porn, and now there’s car porn, gear porn, interior design porn or a plethora of other pleasurable ways of staring at lustful objects of desire. These days, red-blooded Americans aren’t just looking at Lyndsay Lohan, they’re also spending countless hours on ebay, craigslist, cnet, architectural digest and autoblog to oggle at the latest stuff. How how does that affect hykoo? Simple, classified ads on hykoo won’t necessarily just be transactional, utilitarian experiences, but also allow for visual gratification for lurkers and casual browsers. In other words, most people aren’t really going to be buying that BMW convertible you have for sale, but they can still oggle at the lusty photos, and in doing so they may pass the ad around to their friends. Certainly the person who does end up showing interest in the car will want to spend as much time not only reading the fine print (mileage, price, etc) but also gratifying himself over the half-naked shot of that BMW hardtop convertible in mid-pose. Hykoo can help facilitate this by encouraging people to upload lots of photos and showcasing them in big, bold layouts, – its not just a classifieds listing anymore, its also an experience, and often a slightly erotic one.
Categories: Classifieds Intelligence
Buddy Zone from Vastal.com has cloned Myspace and Youtube and will sell you the customizable apps for around $400. There’s even a free, open source social networking platform called phpizabi – the problem for me is that they’re both written in PHP and support is nonexistent. Still, it may be a good way to quickly build a prototype, find money and build again.
Categories: Ruby on Rails & Development
I’m going to keep this updated as more useful tidbits pour in. A ton of great Rails articles here. The folks behind food social site Chow.com reveals some of their favorite Rails toolkits. The guys behind Curbly.com – a social network for interior designer wannabees has a great list of social network friendly Rails plugins here
Categories: Ruby on Rails & Development
Developer Bruce Tate goes through the technical hurdles and decision-making when it came time to build ChangingthePresent.org – a social network for good deeds. He goes over why he chose Rails, the agile environment, and some of the key database configurations he chose. Here’s an example:
“First, let’s get the basics out of the way. Rails is fundamentally a LAMP architecture, We deploy our site on Sun hardware, behind BigIP load balancers. Like many newer Rails sites, we chose Mongrel as our application server, a lighttpd derivative for static content, and MySQL. Our database is deployed in a master/master/slave configuration for fail over, performance, and scalability.”
Read the case study here.
Categories: Ruby on Rails & Development
Written by experts Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka, Railsspace is currently available by pre-order on Amazon or as a rough-cut on Safari Books. According to the book’s overview, Railspace
“focuses on using Rails to build a large database-backed Web application–precisely the kind of application for which Rails is perfectly suited. The application built in this book is a social-networking site like Facebook or MySpace. This represents four principal advantages. First, social networking is a hot topic and is currently generating a high degree of excitement. Second, a social networking application is a big undertaking, giving the authors a chance to show off the many features Rails has to handle large, complex projects, including the Model-Controller-View (MVC) architecture, automated testing, and code refactoring. Third, the authors have extensive experience with this type of application: Michael Hartl cofounded a company to develop sports applications with a strong social component, and Aurelius Prochazka was a founder of ArsDigita, a pioneer in the development of social networking sites. Finally, the step-by-step tutorial approach allows users to see Rails as it is actually used, resulting in learning by example.”
Finally, a complete roadmap for those hoping to build the next mySpace or Youtube. I’ve ordered a rough copy from Safari and will give you some impressions after reading it.
Categories: Ruby on Rails & Development
As I promised, I was reading Kathy Harris last night and found a good topic “Dumbness of Crowds” – in it she separates collective intelligence against “dumbness of crowds”. Using a Flickr example, she mentions how the Flickr userbase organically selecting the coolest pictures is an example of collective intelligence while a community asked to collectively create an original picture is demonstrative of the potential “dumbness” of crowds. Despite art’s subjective nature, I agree, the thing won’t have a guiding vision, which some think all great art needs to have. (Kathy Harris may also appreciate filmmaking’s ‘auteur theory’). As always, she enlightens us with a nice disclaimer about relying too much on a central web 2.0 tenet. I have to admit I was just a bit disappointed she didn’t veer the conversation into one of several hybrid approaches for community involvement.
Hybrid Approach # 1: The Benevolent Dictator
Benevolent dictators don’t exactly let the community decide (what self respecting dictator lets the community decide?), but like Google and Mayor Bloomberg and other powerful community leaders in a dominant position, they have the community’s interest at heart and generally heed the advice (or rage) of an advisory board made of community representatives, but they really don’t have to, and often depart from the script at will whenever they please. I used to think Craig Newmark was a Benevolent Dictator, but his flagging system has become so automated that its much more of a collective intelligence approach to cleaning up spam.
Approach #2: The Moderated Community.
This is alot like a community run by a benevolent dictator, but in this case, its more like a country run by Congress, instead of the President, or a city run by the Assembly instead of the Mayor. Many smart forum communities have established “wranglers” that steer the conversation, kick out users, and generally run the community under a mostly silent leader/publisher. This is a great approach, its only downfall is it takes resources to have alot of wranglers and moderators around, and for a bootstrap start up, I had to come up with something else.
Approach #3: collective intelligence meets historical standards.
This is our approach, which utilizes collective intelligence and community empowerment but also sets pre-determined thresholds based on a community’s historical leanings on the issue. For example, while community intelligence determines that a ’sex service’ ad on craigslist is deemed Offensive, who determines the number (or threshold) at which point these ads should be purged? My research on craigslist suggests that its somewhat artibrarily determined by Craig & Co. and is often randomized in a bid to foil spammers. On hykoo, we will take a city’s historical tolerance when setting these thresholds, and therefore each community will have its own threshold standards for exactly when ads are purged after being flagged. It may take 50 flags to be removed from the New York market, but the same salacious ad may only be flagged 20 times in Minneapolis before disappearing. While we’re still working on a way to quantify historical decency and other standards for every community, lets not get too crazy, we all know Vegas is not Omaha and vice versa.
Categories: Uncategorized
As I promised, I was reading Kathy Harris last night and found a good topic “Dumbness of Crowds” – in it she separates collective intelligence against “dumbness of crowds”. Using a Flickr example, she mentions how the Flickr userbase organically selecting the coolest pictures is an example of collective intelligence while a community asked to collectively create an original picture is demonstrative of the potential “dumbness” of crowds. Despite art’s subjective nature, I agree, the thing won’t have a guiding vision, which some think all great art needs to have. (Kathy Harris may also appreciate filmmaking’s ‘auteur theory’). As always, she enlightens us with a nice disclaimer about relying too much on a central web 2.0 tenet. I have to admit I was just a bit disappointed she didn’t veer the conversation into one of several hybrid approaches for community involvement.
Hybrid Approach # 1: The Benevolent Dictator
Benevolent dictators don’t exactly let the community decide (what self respecting dictator lets the community decide?), but like Google and Mayor Bloomberg and other powerful community leaders in a dominant position, they have the community’s interest at heart and generally heed the advice (or rage) of an advisory board made of community representatives, but they really don’t have to, and often depart from the script at will whenever they please. I used to think Craig Newmark was a Benevolent Dictator, but his flagging system has become so automated that its much more of a collective intelligence approach to cleaning up spam.
This is alot like a community run by a benevolent dictator, but in this case, its more like a country run by Congress, instead of the President, or a city run by the Assembly instead of the Mayor. Many smart forum communities have established “wranglers” that steer the conversation, kick out users, and generally run the community under a mostly silent leader/publisher. This is a great approach, its only downfall is it takes resources to have alot of wranglers and moderators around, and for a bootstrap start up, I had to come up with something else.
Approach #3: collective intelligence meets historical standards.
This is our approach, which utilizes collective intelligence and community empowerment but also sets pre-determined thresholds based on a community’s historical leanings on the issue. For example, while community intelligence determines that a ’sex service’ ad on craigslist is deemed Offensive, who determines the number (or threshold) at which point these ads should be purged? My research on craigslist suggests that its somewhat artibrarily determined by Craig & Co. and is often randomized in a bid to foil spammers. On hykoo, we will take a city’s historical tolerance when setting these thresholds, and therefore each community will have its own threshold standards for exactly when ads are purged after being flagged. It may take 50 flags to be removed from the New York market, but the same salacious ad may only be flagged 20 times in Minneapolis before disappearing. While we’re still working on a way to quantify historical decency and other standards for every community, lets not get too crazy, we all know Vegas is not Omaha and vice versa.
Categories: Hykoo and Web 2.0 approach
