Existing patterns

• Friend lists and groups – Friends are the bread and butter of social networking (this should be obvious). If your social networking web site isolates users from each other, it is not a social networking site.
• Status frameworks – Status updates are quickly becoming a vital part of social networks. Services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook have made this very clear. Features such as “message walls” and status updates provide users with ways to keep their networks updated and in the know.
• Open data access – Free the data. If you want to spark huge third-party development communities, you’ve got to open up access to your data. Facebook and others quickly figured this out and are now more successful because of the extremely active developer communities.
• Media sharing – This is still a murky area that no one has really nailed perfectly, but giving users a way to share their media is essential. Words are great, but pictures, audio and video are even better. As more mobile devices with higher quality cameras (both still and video) enter the market, more users will want to share their media with friends.
• Transparency – This is a big one. Most people understand that advertising funds most of the great services available on the web. The most successful social networking applications work in the required advertising without getting in the way of their users and without impeding the flow of information between users. Roadblocks, sleazy ads and interface annoyances will ultimately drive away users. If you need an example of this in action, look at MySpace.

Patterns missing in action

• Separation of friends and acquaintances – A huge problem for many users is dealing with casual acquaintances. Are they really friends? Do they belong in my network? You know who these people are: the guy you knew in high school but never once talked to who now wants to be your friend on XYZ network. Do you turn him down and risk being rude, or do you accept is request and start down the slippery slope of diluting your friend list? There needs to be a better way to handle the different levels of friendships that most people maintain.
• Friend recommendation – Last.FM, Pandora, Flickr, and YouTube are great at serving up content that you never knew you would like. Why can’t the same be said for social networking sites? Why can’t a recommendation engine be built that recommends people who might be a good fit for you as a friend, even if they aren’t already linked to one of your friends? This is an untapped market.
• Friend discovery – Friend recommendation is one thing, friend discovery is something entirely different. Social networks usually end up with fragmented or incomplete circles of friends. Not many social networks to a great job of helping me find my existing friends on their network. Some are getting better at it, but existing friend discovery could be improved.
• Credibility indicators – This could be considered a requirement for friend recommendation. Social networks should provide more tools that allow users to judge the credibility of other users. How do I know if this person is a legitimate friend possibility or just someone looking to hock their blog or web site? Indicators that are based on the aggregate actions of a user would be a great feature.

Patterns that should go away

• Email systems – Users already have email, stop being redundant. This is especially true when a web site sends an alert to a user’s real email address to let them know that they have new email on their site.
• Page view generators – Stop inserting detours that are meant solely to increase page views. “One of your friends is having a birthday today, click here to find out who!” Ugh. (I’m looking at you, MySpace)
• Site-specific chat rooms and instant messaging – Again, users already have their preferred way of chatting. Leave it be and stop fragmenting the market further.

The Good:

• Much faster development time, especially for prototyping (via scaffolding)
• Less time spent on boiler-plate web application functionality (e.g. user authentication, form creation, etc)
• Easily maintainable code base a la coding standards and documentation
• Consistent code across projects translates into the elimination of the learning curve each time your developers transition to different projects
• New hires are either already familiar with the framework (and can start coding immediately) or are easily trained via online documentation and a (usually) active community

The Bad:

• Rarely will the framework do everything you want, and often it will do more than you need, this is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all frameworks
• Bloated framework code bases try to be everything to everyone. Do you really need a garage-full of power tools to hammer a single nail?
• Since you don’t write and verify every single line of code, there is the possibility of frameworks introducing security risks of which you are unaware (however, there is probably a better chance that an open source framework is more secure, because multiple developers are constantly looking over and improving the code)
• Framework vendor lock-in can limit your flexibility. Although you can always switch frameworks for new projects, older projects are tied to the release schedule of the framework provider unless you invest the time to customize the framework yourself.

The Thought-Provoking:

Something to consider is that hardware is cheaper than manpower. In most cases, bloated code leads to slower average load times. However, this is easily overcome by upgrading your server hardware to handle the loads. Since development times are slashed and code maintenance is much easier, you don’t need to hire as many developers. Fewer developers means more cash that can be routed into infrastructure improvements. Ultimately, a few more hard drives and memory is much cheaper than a few more programmer salaries.

Implementation of a standard framework will also have the benefit of focusing your hiring methods and cutting down your new hire training time. For example, instead of searching for generic PHP developers who will need to learn your in-house coding methodologies, you can search for [insert your framework of choice] developers who can hit the ground running on day one.

The decision of whether or not to use a framework for your next project depends entirely on your needs and resources. However, there is definitely a trend in the web development world towards frameworks because of the time-saving benefits that they provide. What are your opinions on frameworks? Leave a comment and let us know!

Here are some of the improvements that Hot Scripts users will see:

• Google-ized relevancy: Search results are now much more relevant to the search queries thanks to the Google relevancy algorithms.
• Searches are MUCH faster. Additionally, the intermediate “please wait” screen has been removed.
• The interface has been cleaned up and simplified so that interaction with the search results is easier.
• An additional License Type filter has been added. Now you can filter search results by the type of license: All, Free, or Commercial.
• User searches are now cached for better performance. If you go back and search for the same term a second time, the site doesn’t need to query the Google Mini again.

The Development Process
Plugging in the Google Mini was a fun experience. Google has gone great lengths to ensure that the process is painless. The Mini provides two ways of getting the result set: you can let the appliance serve up the results in a customizable template, or you can request the results be returned in XML. In the case of HotScripts, we went the XML route since some post-processing of the result sets is necessary to accommodate our sponsored listings. The XML that the search appliance generates is very robust and well documented.

The appliance itself is no slouch, either. Before launching, we went performed some stress testing to make sure that the Mini could keep up with the HotScripts search traffic. The Mini didn’t skip a beat during any of our tests; it handled even the heaviest loads with ease. Overall, I was very impressed with the ease of use of the Mini. Google support was also very helpful.

Try the search out for yourself and let us know what you think!