Social Networking Sites

syncosised

Hey guys, I'll be spending a lot of the summer developing my PHP coding skills because I may need them for my final year project next year. The way I'm going to do this is to develop my own social networking site, as a proof of concept rather than to actually launch it as a money-making machine!

We all see social networks as different things, and if I were to develop it based on what I want, it'd be probably crap for everyone else. Though it's just a proof of concept, research and design are a very important part of doing any project, so any feedback you guys could give me would be great.

I've put together a little survey which you can find here. I reckon it'll take about 5 minutes, but it would be very interesting to see what a somewhat varied group of people age and gender-wise.

So if you have time to do the survey, that'd be awesome. If not, thanks for reading this far! Any extra comments can be left privately at the end of the survey, or you can post them here!

I've cleared this with the mods anyway, I didn't want it to come across as spammy, it'd just be really helpful for me. Thanks again!

Insect Overlord

Syncosised and I have discussed this, and I've given him permission to link to his survey in this thread.

Feel free to comment in this thread (as well as in the survey) about what you enjoy about such sites as Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc, what first attracted you to them, what might have turned you off those sites.

jumpguy

I did the survey, some questions were strangely phrased but the "?" at the bottom helped me out and it was quite good and easy! Personally I'd like to see a reduction in features and a return to fresh, cleaner simplicity. Perhaps if features could be integrated in this way it'd be nice. But atm, stuff on Bebo like quizzes that clog up people's pages are very, very annoying. It basically means you have to wait a half an hour for the page to load and then trawl through it find whatever you want.

Also, moar music integrated stuff!

degausserxo

I was a big myspace geek back in the day. I prefer being able to use (albeit basic) texts in your profile to change layouts and such. Just sayin'.

Konata

Done. Nice survey actually, kinda enjoyed doing it

Ah Jaysus, remember the days of Bebo? Sharing the Luv and profile views and the like...

syncosised

Wow, loads of responses already, this is great. There's already a pattern emerging, some things I expected and others I was surprised at. Thanks to everyone who's taken the survey so far. When more people have taken it, I'll let ye know what the statistics show!

D4RK ONION

I don't really use facebook, but I do have fake page, just for stalking and general linkery. The chat feature seems pretty effective there. I always like chats integrated to these things cause it takes that element of private conversation out of the public comments.

On Ning sites they do a ning wide chat at the bottom too, which really builds a sense of community. They have a really good one on the nerdfighter ning, and it's well modded and has some often very cool conversation in there.

Just a thought

syncosised

That's a good suggestion, chat on Facebook is very well done. I always found it a bit poor on Bebo myself. There's a good bit of work to it, but I'll definitely have it somewhere on the desired features list.

This is great, I have 12 full responses from here already!

D4RK ONION

And it's Paddy's day! There's a lot of lurkers in this forum, so they are probably helping too.

It's good to see you finally getting going with Jupli though, I was disappointed that you seemed to have forgotten it!

syncosised

I just haven't had the time really, third year is such a massive workload! I'll be working during the summer though, in a job very much related to my course, which is awesome. I probably won't be working on it at work, but I'll have plenty of free time to do it anyway.

phlegms

Survey taken, good luck with the project

Aoibheann

Survey done! Oh, and facebook chat sucks, it makes me want to die inside (MSN ftw!). I'm going off Facebook, but that's more down to my poor attention span probably. I get sick of social networking sites very easily!

hitlersson666

Facebook is reallystarting to irk me espicallt the chat feature because you cant turn it off like msn . If it had a easy way to make skins would be good as well

Max Power1

survey taken...
interesting to see if/when this comes to fruition and what the takeup rate is

Pygmalion

If there is ever any flash content on the site (ads, apps or otherwise) I will find out where you live and murder you on principle.

syncosised

Duly noted, Pygmalion! I'm not a fan of Flash at all anyway, I believe in open source technologies and universal compatibility.

With all the feedback I'm getting, I should probably add more questions about chat and stuff, but it'd skew the results a bit so I won't. I will note everything added here or at the end of the survey though.

hitlersson666 wrote: »

Facebook is reallystarting to irk me espicallt the chat feature because you cant turn it off like msn . If it had a easy way to make skins would be good as well

You can actually turn it off, just click Chat -> Options -> Go Offline.

Pygmalion

hitlersson666 wrote: »

If it had a easy way to make skins would be good as well

Actually this, I assume since you "believe in open source technologies and universal compatibility" there'll be separate CSS and (X)HTML, perhaps having a user able to upload their own stylesheet could work?

I can see it being a problem though for security or something, if they can have it load arbitrary URLs (such as saying the background image is http://jupli.com/logout.php) so you might need to do some filtering and the like (also anything changing the state of the site or a user session like logging out could be done with forms and limited to POST requests so that merely requesting the page like that wouldn't work).

/rambling on.

syncosised

Yeah, I've been thinking about how themes would work, and there's definitely a security risk of sorts when you let them add their own HTML, and to an extent, CSS. I reckon half the work, if not more, will be security. I've been looking into PHP frameworks as they have a lot of the functionality needed while offering tried and tested security solutions. But I haven't decided yet!

Slow Show

I like simple stuff, hate apps, love fan pages on facebook :pac: I hate how some things can be a popularity contest [bebo top friends, profile views, luv]...Facebook chat is great, bebo chat was disastrous...
Actually just steer clear of anything related to Bebo, then you should be just fine...

syncosised

Yup, I'm going to stay away from anything too Bebo-y anyway. I want it to be a fairly mature kind of site.

I'll post some interesting results later. If you haven't taken the survey already, please do!

No games, no apps, and an ability to hide anything related to pages or groups from showing up on a public feed. Also, good privacy control. Facebook's privacy control is good (although their privacy policy raises a lot of concerns), so something similar to that. I'd like a system where, as you've said in your survey, only friends who know a certain piece of information about me could find me.

Hope it works for you.

syncosised

I've put up a post on the blog with a summary of the results of the survey. Hopefully I didn't waffle on for too long!

Pygmalion

Have to say, awesome Wordpress theme.

syncosised

Haha glad you enjoyed the blog! :pac: It is a nice theme though!

D4RK ONION

Very interesting blog indeed, I look forward to seeing the project moving forward!

D4RK ONION

I'm hijacking this thread somewhat, you can have it back later Syncróid!

I'm just back from a ball, and for the first time, I can see a clear advantage to joining facebook with a real account. People are going to be putting up photos and chatting and stuff, and I reckon I am probably the only person out of about 400 who is not on facebook who was there.

Obviously if they had the sense to join boards this wouldn't be a problem, but they do not and so, I left with this list.

Reasons to Join Facebook: Photos and Friends and stuff

Reasons to continue being a stuborn bastard: Snobbery, sheeple, having to listen to people say OH YOU JOINED FACEBOOK OMG I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WOULD etc.

Yet another online distraction.

So I leave it open to you fine people. Should I join facebook? Give me your reasons, and I will go with the majority rule, I trust you wonderful people.

Pygmalion

D4RK ONION wrote: »

Reasons to Join Facebook: Photos and Friends and stuff

Reasons to continue being a stuborn bastard: Snobbery, sheeple, having to listen to people say OH YOU JOINED FACEBOOK OMG I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WOULD etc.

Yet another online distraction.

So I leave it open to you fine people. Should I join facebook? Give me your reasons, and I will go with the majority rule, I trust you fine people.

In my experience facebook is pretty much never used for discussions and such, people put photos up and they're pretty much never commented on.
It's pretty much entirely just people joining the "groups" and stuff once the novelty wears off.

So that's a "no point to it" from me

Davidius

Even I have a Facebook page, a lot of it seems like a big steaming pile of shíte so I don't actually use for anything other than talking to the odd person. Can't imagine why people spend as much time as they do on it.

But you might as well, could come in handy every now and then. There's no real loss if you never bother using it.

Ginja Ninja

I use mine to keep in contact with folks from back home that I don't see due to college etc. nice to see how they are getting on.

and you can delete your account or just abandoon the page if you think it sucks something fierce.Just don't try farmville

D4RK ONION

Yes, I hear Farmville is something akin to crack.

syncosised

I thought someone was playing a prank when I received a friend request from you! :O