Unconventional Everything (Mikamai)

Da oggi inauguriamo i MIKAMAI Comics – per il momento online sulla Mikamai Fan Page, su Facebook. Una striscia al giorno: stay tuned!

MIKAMAI office in Milan deserves many surprises. One of them is couchsurfing, and we’re proud of it. Therefore, while organizing our working place we are able to host travelling people.

The last few weeks were full of hosts enjoying Milan and MIKAMAI hospitality. Come and visit us ;)

Da alcuni mesi abbiamo cominciato a collaborare con Cloudify, un’azienda focalizzata sullo sviluppo di soluzioni e consulenza nell’ambito delle tecnologie di Cloud Computing - fondata da Federico Feroldi.

Cloudify assiste le imprese nell’integrazione del Cloud Computing nella loro infrastruttura IT e nelle loro strategie di business, costruendo e gestendo ambienti ed infrastrutture di prossima generazione.

It occasionally happens that, while talking to friends, I start using words specific to my job and our type of work.   In my case, I often talk about communities and social networks, and we all know these are being used by more and more people everyday, and I am always need to be reminded that these terms do not mean the same thing to everyone. Especially if the people I am talking to come from different backgrounds with different web experiences.

For example it is like the famous web 2.0 where everyone has his own personal definition for what web 2.0 really is and some deny that it exists or others are convinced that we are already in web 4.0 without even having passed go. It is kind of like coffee around the world, every country has their own way of making it.

I am going to attempt, even if it will be incomplete, to give a universal definition to explain if possible this phenomenon.

Consulting Wikipedia:

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.

The online management of a social network is entrusted to a series of tools that are accessible from your pc desktop such as: skype, messenger, pidgin, bonjour or directly from the browser: chat, forums and generally speaking all sites that allow users to connect and communicate between one another.

As Giovanna Cosenza (my professor for the semiotics of new media) taught me, all these tools really can be considered environments: chat environment, forum environment, the instant messaging environment and so on. Basically participating in a chat is like being in a room talking to other people. Not surprisingly, the metaphor of “rooms” was used in the early releases of these communication tools, and has now been converted from chat rooms to discussions or topics.

Now, that we are on the same page, I can now discuss the web-based environments or groups where users are able to connect and talk to each other and I will take this opportunity to use McLuhan’s famous statement “the medium is the message“, and I will define these environments as “social networks”.

A social network is a web-based environment where users can connect, communicate and share information and here I would add a note, of sharing, personal information.

Is Google reader a social network? The users have the possibility to share news with others. And here we enter in one of the many grey areas, I would say yes but no. Yes, we can share news with others but we can really communicate with them and so I would say this is really more an news feed.

Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, LinkedIn all have similar basic communications functions and they connect users and these can all be defined happily and easily as social networks.

The fact that these are social networks is not news to anyone, everyone agrees that this is the correct definition to give them. However, I think it is very important to use these examples as a basis for moving ahead and helping define other communities as social networks.

Using the criteria I have used to define a social network can anyone help me find any made and managed in Italy?

(Thanks for the english translation, Liz! Original post here!)

Social network? What is it all about, what is the goal?

The simple answer would be: It’s about connecting people, creating a space where people can share the same interests. It can be everything like dating, dancing, studies and so on. Social network is the new reason for people to spend hours on internet everyday. The most famous social plate-form of the moment is for sure Facebook and this success inspire lots of companies to create their own social website, to build their own graph of users. It’s such a big potential for companies.

How to start? Which framework can I use? Is Rails a good to choice to make my social network?

If a company wants to create its social network, it has to do it very fast. Building a web application as complex as a social network require a lot of time and starting it from scratch would be a waste of time. Ruby on Rails is a great framework which increase your productivity, but I won’t talk about some aspects which are already well documented on the web, related to the ruby language and the framework capabilities.

The aspect I want to talk about is how to build it as fast as possible. This way, you will be able to concentrate yourself on the logic of your application. Rails community brings great plugins which will help you to build the bases of your social site.

First of all, you will need to manage users and authentication. You can choose among multiple plugin like “AuthLogic” or “Restful authentication”. It’s very flexible and you can manage complex user authentication. You will certainly have to work with attachments like avatars, galleries or files. For that you can use the famous plugins called PaperClip or Attachment_fu. They can manage also image manipulations which is very useful if you work with photos.

All the social networks are able to send you mail notifications when some users wants to interact with you for different reasons like friendship requests, messages, etc… Rails provides a email framework called ActionMailer. It allows you to create mail templates, send and receive emails with few configuration.

Finally you want to expand you social network, get more users. It implies you to translate your website for the different countries you are targeting. Rails provide, out of the box, a very simple way to do it. You have just to maintain one YAML file for every languages you want to support. There are lots of other plugins for tagging, activity feeds (Timeline_fu, pagination(Will_paginate), comments(Acts_as_commentable), etc…

In addition to those plugins there are a lot of tutorials, screencasts in rails which explain the good way to do the redundant functionalities of websites in rails, how to use those plugins. I think obviously to the screencasts on http://railscasts.com which are very well done.