05.30.08

Bakeoff: Social Networking Platforms

Posted in Business, Tech at 9:13 am by Colin Steele

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:

• How hard is it to scale to 5E6 pageviews/month?
• How hard is it to extend the platform?
• Suitability of platform to CMS?
• Suitability of platform to social networking?
• Extensibility?
• Ease of integration of 3rd parties; Flickr, YouTube, OpenSocial.
• Suitability to hosting via EC2/S3.

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.)

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05.29.08

Myspace. Sadness.

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:45 pm by Colin Steele

I’ve just completed my first custom Myspace page for a consulting client.

Words that come to me are things like shameful, nauseating, broken, hopeless, confused, and ugly.

Myspace, you should be ashamed of yourself. And you deserve every bit of the ass kicking that Facebook sends your way. If your definition of “customizable” is godawful nested CSS “table table table table” nonsense, then… yeesh. I’m speechless.  That’s not a presentation layer.  It’s a pillow held over my face while I sleep.

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