The Problem
Back in 2005/6 myself and Sam Gower, founded Group-13.com a software development team. We were fed up of how social networking was done on the web, and wanted to use the recent advancements in Web 2.0 to create a social network that wasn’t absolutely terrible. At the time, for a non-university student the only viable options for social networking were myspace, and bebo both which were horrific for anyone older than 13 years old, or any programmer or designer.
Myspace
Messily coded, horribly designed and always broken. “Tom” kept adding features to an unstable website, and something was ALWAYS broken.
The only thing that was good about this website was that it wasn’t bebo. The “profile” customisation wasn’t so much customisation, more like “copy paste HTML from 1000′s of websites, and add glitter text.”
This site seemed to be used mainly by older/alternative people, mainly because the music section of the website is used by almost every band in the world to promote their music.
“I preferred bebo because myspace had all the stupid, annoying code things, for like.. layouts and stuff”
Kizzie Hall – Bebo and Facebook user.
Bebo
For code and design this site seemed a bit more organized, all of the site followed a consistent theme, and there was an “easy” way to customize your profile. You were able to pick from thousands of user generated themes, and could create your own by uploading images to replace the original ones. However this site was still full of glitter text and “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes.
As a whole the users of bebo seemed to be the more than 90% “Chavs” and people that were put off by myspace’s complexity.
“I don’t even know why anyone uses bebo any more. I always get emails from it but I just ignore them since they are all from fake people anyway, it’s always spam”
Tom Barnes formally from myspace, now from facebook.
The Solution
In comes G-13, we set up a consistently designed, functional, secure social networking site using OpenID, AJAX and other relativity new web technologies to create something that was fresh, attractive and simple to use.
Originally Codenamed “Olympus” we aimed really high with what we wanted to do – many of the features we had working in an early alpha state have recently been implemented into Facebook and Myspace. Most notably “facebook chat”. Another concept we were using is the 2 bar system, a menu at the top and information and chats on the bottom bar.
Used concepts
I wanted to talk about some of the stuff we wanted out of a social network in 2005, and how it has ended up on the web today. The concepts we had below were all part of our much larger plan for world domination.
- Favourite Contacts
recently added to Windows Live Messenger, Favourite contacts allowed you to group your friends into groups like “Family”, “Friends” “Other” etc, but you could pick contacts out of those groups to appear in a group that is always at the top of your contacts list called “Favourites” so they are easy to contact at all times.
- Favourites
Similar to services like del.icio.us and magnolia, Olympus would allow you to have a “stream” of bookmarks, that friends could see, along with private bookmarks to allow you to transport your bookmarks to any computer you used.
Unused concepts
I’m going to write a little bit about some things myself and Sam designed/planned on doing with Novus.
By this point the codename for our social network had changed to Novus, this was due to the imminent release of PHPbb 3 also named Olympus. Anyway, onto the concepts.
- Site wide music playlist
The idea behind this was to add a playlist to the bottom bar of the website, for example next to facebook chat, with a playlist, and all the other features you’d want from a music player. The idea was to allow you to add tracks to a playlist from bands profiles, like how youtube allows you to create playlists, but it would allow you to continue to use the site without having to stop listening to whatever band you liked. Other sites that follow a similar concept have started up, Last.fm and Pandora, along with Spotify, but not what we had in mind at the time.
- Useful Applications
The creation of external applications was going to have very strict rules on what could, and couldn’t be added to the site. This was to stop all of the spam, and the “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes. There was also going to be applications created by us, as sort of “addons” to the website, thinks like calculators, clocks, etc.
- Homepage
A useful homepage, which allowed to to add your own “widgets” to it. RSS Feeds and the like. The best description of this would be a kind of iGoogle and Facebook home mashup.
