Building a Social Network Site in Rails
Apr 25, 2008 Social Media, Social Networking, Video, Web, Web 2.0
I’m not going to cover how to actually code an entire social network site in rails as all social network sites vary in their functionality (and it’ll take too long). I will cover plugins and other things you might find useful though.
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Building a Social Network Site in Rails
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Tags: ffmpeg-html, flash, plugins-html, rails, site, swfupload-html, thinking-sphinx, Web, web-2-0
Social Gaming Network Buys Facebook Market Share
Apr 16, 2008 General
Consolidation is already beginning in the overcrowded Facebook application market (with 21,800 apps and counting). One of the first sectors to see buyouts of popular apps is in the social gaming sector. Earlier this year, Zynga bought CLZ Concepts and the Superheroes group of apps. Today, competitor Social Gaming Network (SGN) is responding with its own roll-up of Esgut (which created Suplerlatives, Entourage, and Text Twirl), Free Gifts, Nicknames, Oregon Trail and Friend Block. This moves SGN up the rankings in terms of total Facebook users (48.5 million) that have installed one of its apps, which puts it right behind Slide (97.7 million) and RockYou (72.6 million) and one spot ahead of Zynga (34.7 million). Of course, some of the biggest apps that SGN bought aren’t really games (Superlatives and Entourage), and in terms of daily active users, which is a more meaningful measure, Zynga is still ahead with 1.9 million versus 1.1 million.
Still, SGN is obviously serious about scaling up its business by hiring, acquiring, or partnering with the best Facebook app developers out there. The developers behind Free Gifts, Esgut, and Nicknames have now joined SGN as co-founders. “We are building a brain-trust of leading app talent,” says CEO Shervin Pishevar. He recently spun off SGN from Webs.com and moved his entire team from the East Coast to Palo Alto. And this morning it just released the sequal to its popular Warbook game on Facebook—Warbook:Rise of the Infernals.
The company has also launched its own cross-promotional advertising network for other gaming apps and is in the process of raising $10 million. There are now 70 games and other apps on its Gaming Hub.
One of them, Free Gifts, is now part of SGN. More than 70 million virtual gifts have been exchanged between Facebook members so far. Brands sponsor the gifts, and there is a potential for direct consumer purchase of gifts as well within a gaming context. Pishevar is almost as excited about the prospect of virtual gifts as he is about social games:
It is real, it is happening, it is underground. I think it has a potential to become as important or more important than the advertising revenue.
The race between SGN and Zynga to become the biggest social gaming network is a race for talent, a race for active users, and most importantly, a race to see who can make money first. But while they keep elbowing each other for position, they shouldn’t forget that newer entrants with social-gaming platform ambitions are always trying to close in behind them.
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Music Tax: The iPod Approach
Apr 16, 2008 General
Music executives from the UK continue to try to out-dumb their counterparts in the U.S. We’ve barely started to settle down from the Warner Bros. led attack (with both economic and emotional sorties) here in the U.S., and now our UK brothers are getting bombed with the idea of an iPod tax to counter those sneaky users who “format shift” files from a CD to a MP3 player.
The UK’s Music Business Group, a coalition of music industry entities (composers, songwriters,
performers, managers, producers, record labels, music publishers), said in a report “Unquestionably, there is a value produced by the ability to format shift. It is imperative that creators and performers should benefit directly from this value.”
The report also states “Composers and performers are entitled to earn a living from their creative endeavours” which parallels Ethan Kaplan’s (VP Technology, Warner Bros. Records)argument that the quality of music shouldn’t matter when it comes to compensation to the artist.
It is exactly this line of thinking – righteous entitlement – that leads to the idea of using taxes to support businesses that can’t support themselves. Music taxes in any form are a bad idea and always will be.
These people won’t quit until they’re out of business. So let’s hasten the go-out-of-business process as quickly as possible. Think twice before you buy any form of music. Just send money directly to the artist instead.
See also:
The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
Replacing DRM With A Music Tax Is Incredibly Stupid
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Tungle Brings Own Approach to Scheduling Meetings
Apr 16, 2008 General
Meeting coordination service Timebridge now has serious competition from Tungle, a Montreal-based service that opens up into public beta today.
When I met with Tungle CEO Marc Gringas this past January, he outlined the type of technology that would address the major pain points of scheduling meetings: it would reduce the number of transactions needed to pick a time, it would be simple to use across time zones, it would be an open system for anyone to use, and people would be able to see each others’ schedules with it.
Tungle does a good job fulfilling most of these principles. It comes as an Outlook plugin that automatically loads all of your contacts and calendar events (either from Outlook itself or other calendar apps like Google Calendar). You can choose to share your schedule with others who also have the plugin installed, and you can invite others to a meeting whether or not they even use Outlook.
The invitation system is key. Tungle users can invite non-Tungle users by sending them a link to a special coordination page. This “Tungle Space” page shows your availability and solicits their input for when they are also available. If your schedule changes after sending out the invitation, the Tungle Space page will update itself accordingly. And you can use it to invite multiple people to the same meeting. As people visit the page and indicate when they are available, the options get narrowed down until the last invitee to respond chooses a time.
There are many similarities between Tungle and TimeBridge (see our review of the latter here) but Gringas stresses that TimeBridge has more of a “wish list” approach to it, where organizers suggest a set of times and these get either accepted or rejected by invitees. But while Tungle may be more about finding the overlapping free time in participants’ schedules, it lacks the freedom of TimeBridge, which can be used entirely through the browser.
When it comes down to it, this type of product will mostly appeal to a certain class of professionals that needs to schedule group meetings all the time. Many of us only schedule one-on-one meetings that take at most a few emails to pin down, and we won’t be bothered to change our habits. But I imagine there are many assistants and managers out there who will find this very helpful and worth the effort of picking it up.
Tungle raised $1.5M CAD from JLA Ventures and Des Jardins Venture Capital in May 2007. Jiffle is another competitor we covered just last week.
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Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice
Apr 16, 2008 General
Twitter. Don’t leave home without it.
I don’t know if this is as good for Twitter as the Charlie Rose incident was for Apple, but it’s close. UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.
He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf.
The next day Buck twittered ” Alive and ok. Still in jail,” but was released not too long afterwards. He’s still worried about his friend, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, who was arrested with him and remains in jail. Buck says he is on a hunger strike until his friend is free.
Information provided by CrunchBase
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