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Blog: December Archive
Social Networking Platforms: Part 1
Recently, in preparation for my next project, I have been researching Social Networking platforms because, as you may have noticed, you can't make two clicks on the Web without running into a discussion of Social Networking and Social Media.
For anyone active on the Web as either a user , author or web app provider, the concepts and value of social applications is quite well known by now. But I think it's fair to say that there are still challenges and opportunities in terms of platforms. Anyone looking to provide a social application, or any Web application for that matter, needs to consider at least two major issues:
- How to leverage existing Web platforms and tools.
- How to support and interface to other social Web tools.
Both issues are becoming increasingly more important over time. The first issue is important because as both user familiarity and the variety of social applications increase, so will the expectations for sophisticated but usable features. Anyone, individual or team, will find it increasingly more impossible to be competitive and agile if they are rolling their own platform.
The second issue is a major challenge being faced not only by startup entrepreneurs but also the current giants of the Web such as Google, MySpace and Facebook. It is not uncommon for users to be active on several, if not dozens of, Web apps in order to manage their own information as well as their interaction with content providers and other users. At some point it becomes infeasible as well as undesirable for a user to manage all of those accounts and profiles. Major portal providers are fully aware of this and are trying (desparately in some cases) to consolidate a variety of different social services under one umbrella. Naturally, each portal wants it to be their umbrella, and unfortunately it is highly unlikely that any one of them, not even Google, will ever dominate all other Web apps, both current and future.
Portals such as Google and Facebook are providing APIs and ways for developers to write "plugins" to their platforms. This is a step in the right direction but is still a problem if the portal "owns" all the data or has too much control over the interfaces. True Web integration is only likely if:
- Different organizations can champion different best-in-class (or most-popular-in-class) features and functionality.
- Different types of content is decentralized, i.e. it can be owned and managed by different organizations in different databases. For example, it should be possible for one (or ideally) a few websites like Flickr to manage users' photos, and have other websites interface to and access those other sites as opposed to trying to duplicate this functionality or data content in their own databases and web apps.
In summary, anyone who is considering providing a website or Web application these days needs to consider platforms and how they address the two major issues above.
rk
Django Comments: New, Improved And Working Again
I finally got my blog comments working again. I, like many other bloggers, inevitably had my site fall victim to comment spam. Trying to do a quick fix for this soon put me in a spiral of versioning issues so I simply chose to disable comments until I had time to figure it all out.
A major part of my problem was due to Django (the platform I am using) versioning issues. This is no fault of the Django team--I had simply been merrily running along on a version which was getting progressively out of date and also had accumulated a number of customizations along the way. Getting up to date was not a casual exercise.
Also, the Django comment system had itself changed along the way. For anyone using Django who may be in a similar situation, I recommend seriously looking at these links:
and
Porting your apps from Django 0.96 to 1.0
The good news is that the core Django comments framework now includes built-in spam protection and other improvements so I can avoid the customizations that were causing problems before. Also, not having comment capability was killing my (easily killed) blogging enthusiasm, so this should improve my blogging productivity. rk