write a successful social web application

Okay even though everyone’s doing it and there’s still room for improvement (there always is) I’m giving up on this. I’ve decided that what I’m more interested in is not the interconnectedness of people (or how people want to connect), but of their presence, and of their data amongst systems on the ‘desktopweb’ (as I call it). This is a minor distinction but it’s enough for me to drop this goal which suggests a dedicated SNS.

Ning is amazing! I love it! it’s a great framework. One of the ideas stored in some sticky note was to map my portfolio’s customers. Ning made it very easy. The application is called portfolio oikoumene At least allows you to create quite prototypes!!

Ideas are always everlasting.. Hope to get one good idea for implementing a successful social web application.

So far zero code and a lot of ideas. I’m using VisualMind to keep track of everything. However lending a hand to my brother in his Bienes Raices Panama Site is consuming my free workable hours.

So many of the social apps out there seem to have little usefulness or purpose outside of dating, blogging and such (with a few excluded… 43things being one of them of course. I love the productive, goal-oriented slant to this site.).

My goal is to create various topical and service-oriented web apps which provide useful information to their users and are designed in such a way that data maintenance is handled largely by the community (keeping admin overhead as low as possible). Sorta like combining the wiki approach with social interaction and collaborative community assistance. This means finding creative ways to make the process fun and rewarding for users so that people would care to chip in. It should be an interesting experiment at the very least.

As a prove of my scattered mind I added the goal of learning how to identify birds and in the subsequent research to learn how to do that I finished designing a whole web application to allow a group of people to track those sightings.

The design is mostly complete, I have the user interface mocked up in a prototype. I’ll need Ajax to be able to provide most of the functionality I foresaw.

Next is start to work in the data layer by building the ER diagram into mysql and creating the programming structures required.

I’m going to use PHP since it is what my site provider supports but I was interested in Rails too.

Let’s see.

-My country has a big ammount of biodiversity
-It’s already getting attention as a birdwatcher paradise
-I only could find one place that keeps tracks of sightings and is not automated, not in electronic searchable form, no location, no maps or pictures of the sightings
-It fits perfectly with Panamaensis

I have a lot of ideas but can’t find the time to put them in code.

Setting an initial goal:

-Choose a field and start from there.