Unconventional Everything (Mikamai)

On Wednesday (July 15th, 2009) there’s going to be the second Giant Global Graph meeting. It follows the “GGG breakfast” (pic below), but this time it’s going to be a “GGG Aperitivo” :)

We are going to talk again about the social graph and how we can scrape it, put it to good use, monetize the social capital, create a trust-based economy.

Please bring your laptop, your code, and your own slice of graph: we share a passion for scraping it! :) You can share code, data, slides about your GGG-related project.

What we talked about last time: virtual currencies, Wikipedia as a social network, how to scrape and smush the graphs, subjective search engines, QQ Coins vs Renminbi, The Singularity (the rapture of nerds ?), abundance vs scarcity, trust networks, recommender systems, post-Google scenarios, subjective vs objective logic, Bruce Sterling, Gregg Egan, post-central banks world, and other stuff…

Sounds interesting ? You can sign up here. And yes, we’ll have an aperitivo at the pub after the meeting :)

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.

Thanks to Paolo Massa I found out about this presentation by Erin Malone (Tangible ux) and Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!).

Skip to slide 26 for the juice. It’s a very useful checklist to check if you are missing something out in your social network design and to think about the interactions between patterns.

I’ve been toying for a long time with the idea of tying a Drupal based social network, and at last I got the opportunity of doing that thanks to WikiSAP.

WikiSAP scope goes beyond what Drupal offers out of the box and thanks to that we’ve been able to appreciate the flexibility and the power offered by a well modeled development framework and an endless library of community contributed modules that allowed us to cherry pick in a sea of extra functionality.

Drupal learning curve is steep, the official documentation is sparse and has almost no entry level support and there isn’t an exhaustive document about the complex hooks and overrides system provided by the Drupal core.

A quick search shows that many people stick to good old PHP, rather than going for Drupal, probably scared of the many configuration options.  However building a social site is very possible as there are a number of modules supporting groups and messaging and that can be used in combination as proposed in the lists you can find on Linux Notes, Programming Bulls and Neemie’s blog.

Some good books later, and with an eye fixed on the API page (excellent) we were able to get up to speed and become productive.

Once we reached productivity-land we were able to choose the following modules to extend Drupal beyond the CMS-stage into a Social Network:

• Private Messages: http://drupal.org/project/privatemsg
• Buddylist: http://drupal.org/project/buddylist (you can also try http://drupal.org/project/user_relationship)
• Invites and Contact Grabber: http://drupal.org/project/invite and http://drupal.org/project/dcl_importer
• Groups: http://drupal.org/project/og
• Sharing: http://drupal.org/project/forward (or http://drupal.org/project/send), http://drupal.org/project/addthis
• Simple Mashup: http://drupal.org/project/emfield , http://drupal.org/project/ipaper
• Notifications: http://drupal.org/project/notifications (or http://drupal.org/project/subscriptions)

In addition to those modules there is a set of “standard” modules, not part of the core, but absolutely needed for any serious Drupal development: CCK, Views and Workflow-ng.

Some modules don’t offer the full functionality you’d expect, like Privatemsg, that doesn’t allow to send messages via email or to select contacts from the user’s buddylist. To solve this problem I developed a module that extends Privatemsg, you can find it here. It’s called Privatemsg-ng.

Privatemsg-ng adds the following features to Privatemsg:

• Integration with OG, Buddylist, User roles (core)
• File attachments (the recipient gets a link that allows him to download the attachment)
• Outbound mailing is integrated with job_queue

If you never tried Drupal I highly suggest you try it now.

You can find the italian version of this post here.