I've mentioned before that I'm writing a book for O'Reilly, entitled Building Social Web Applications. It should be published this August. I've written quite a lot of it based on a mixture of interviews and conversations with people at conferences and in London. I'm now writing the more technical chapters and I need your help. I'm an interaction designer and product manager with a good head for technical detail, but being honest I don't write code daily. So it would be great if I can get your input into these three chapters.
The earlier chapters cover the questions of why are you building a social application and look at how people behave and interact with one another online. These three chapters cover how to implement and extend the application. The intent is not to give a lot of technical detail and reams of code, but to explore how social applications differ. They are not the same as building a content publishing system or an online shop. I've created some outlines to give a framework for what I think should be in the chapters, but please let me know what is missing.
I'm not interested in recommending a particular language or framework, nor one particular approach to scaling. I'm also interested in your opinions on centralisation vs distribution and federation. Examples that you can share and suggestions of content to include are most welcome. Dopplr, Flickr, Twitter and sites like LinkedIn or Facebook are the kinds of things I've been featuring, but I've also been looking at adding social features to newspapers, magazine and product companies.
I'm going to put the API and integration chapter up first, the other two, tomorrow. I want to start writing the chapters on the 23rd of March, so about ten days or so from now, so please let me know what you think. I'm zzgavin on twitter and I'll be talking about the book there too.
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