Building a social networking site
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- vaxorcist0
I highly recommend re-skinning something that already works if you can find something that's pretty close to what you want.... the cost will be 1/10th of building from scratch. Allow a week or so to download and test a bunch of things.
The real skillset here is NOT the purely technical, but the client-expectations-management skill... and making sure the warm-fuzzy feeling continues rather than the terrified throw-in-the-kitchen sink feature set panic that can derail things....
Building from scratch will result in lots of testing time and debugging and conceptual "can't get there from here" moments, note that some clients see bugs as a "character flaw" in the programmer rather than a near-inevitable effect of recoding to changing specs all night long...
- vaxorcist0
Similar to my guesses.... but I would add 20% for the random surprise factor.....
Note that adding more people to a late project makes it even later. Ecause of all the explaining tgat has to happen....
Good people are the key.... and note that great programmers are rarely loved by management as much as "yes men" ..... great programmers are often uncomfotable in meetings....
I am scared of programmers who are too comfortable in meetings....
A big project is like a woman having a baby... one woman takes nine months to have a baby and you can't rush it and you cannot simply hire 9 women for one month and get a baby
- Continuity0
Someone on the previous page mention in a note about why people would want to use this particular social network. If your client is serious about this, and they're willing to invest money into this enterprise, it seems to me a strategic planner is a must-have on this team. Maybe even two. Strategic planners are best able to answer the question 'why'.
A solid project manager is also essential, cos this is a huge undertaking.
- SteveJobs0
from experience - quite a bit of it, actually - i'd also recommend going with something that's out of the box. that is, unless you have a small team of over-zealous developers who all have worked on large architected projects and are fully capable of collaborating, and someone who can lead the charge and keep everyone on track and work 12hr days for about 4-5 months with no major architectural changes or re-writes... then, just maybe you can do this yourself. otherwise don't bother.
if you really need it from scratch and have a few hundred k to fund the project, then let me know.
ps. the larger the team, the longer it will take. i did this with myself and one other friend who i've worked with for years, so there was cohesion. the secret ingredients are less people each a jack of all trades.
- LightsDownLow0
Check out Jom Social http://www.jomsocial.com/ Based off of the Joomla platform. Pretty cheap and has a lot of support which is nice.
- SteveJobs0
oh, and i also worked for myspace back when it was the most trafficked site on the web, so i know the large and small of it.
- ukit0