Life… With Ice Cream
Once upon a time, I p’shawed twitter. “Who needs this goofy one-line blog thing? It’s like an IM away message, only without any notion of presence… duh.”
Then for the hell of it, I signed up. And it hit me. “This is brilliant. It’s like IM away status, only it’s syndicated!”
Now, I am a dishearted twitter convert. When will our beloved twitter get its legs back under it? Maybe their new financing will help.
After the nausea-inducing trip to Myspace-customization-land, building a custom Facebook application (using Ruby on Rails and rFacebook) is a picnic. Two and a half days to a working prototype. Not bad.
On a incredibly geeky side note, why doesn’t IE support CSS selectors properly, even in IE7? What year is it?
My client needs to put up scalable and extensible social networking sites for his clients. I need to suss out which platform is the current best of breed. Heretofore, their choice has been Drupal, which has certainly been good enough. I’ve half a mind to say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but I hear anecdotal evidence that scaling Drupal is, ahem… challenging.
I’ve no experience firsthand with building Drupal sites, but the platform seems to have lots of community support, and appears to be evolving at a reasonable rate.
Questions to answer about each platform:
Candidates so far include Drupal (PHP), Mephisto (Rails), SocialSpring (Rails), Joomla (PHP), OpenSocial, Typo3 (PHP),
All this begs a question for me, which probably misses the mark for my client’s clients… but… Why is anyone trying to build social networks anymore? Don’t they realize that they should be building social networking applications, which ride on top of existing (now more-or-less open) networks? (Eg., OpenSocial.)