Simon Willison's Weblog: social-networks

What is the best way one can expand his or her professional network?

2014-01-26T14:47:00+00:00

My answer to What is the best way one can expand his or her professional network? on Quora

Go to events - local meetups, conferences, tradeshows... there's no better way of expanding your professional network than to attend events and build in-person relationships with people.

Tags: facebook, linkedin, networking, social-networks, web-development, quora, india

Why was LinkedIn Events shut down? Why isn't there now a social network for business events?

2014-01-13T12:50:00+00:00

My answer to Why was LinkedIn Events shut down? Why isn't there now a social network for business events? on Quora

Our site Lanyrd offers LinkedIn signin and works as a social network for business and professional events. You can read more about our LinkedIn integration here: Use Lanyrd and LinkedIn to get more out of professional events and conferences

Tags: business, events, linkedin, networking, social-media, social-networks, quora

Why doesn't xkcd site have social media share options?

2013-11-19T13:44:00+00:00

My answer to Why doesn't xkcd site have social media share options? on Quora

My guess: he probably thinks they are a bit tacky.

Plus his target audience are mostly capable of sharing via copy-and-paste URLs without needing the assistance of a share button.

Tags: facebook, social-media, social-networks, xkcd, quora

Events (leisure): What platforms based on sharing/creating users' future plans with friends have been successful?

2013-07-21T12:35:00+00:00

My answer to Events (leisure): What platforms based on sharing/creating users' future plans with friends have been successful? on Quora

The founder of Plancast wrote an extensive post mortem discussing the challenges involved here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2012/0...

A key challenge is that people don't tend to announce their plans more than a few days in advance, which means that the information they share has a very short shelf life during which it is useful.

We've managed to avoid that particular trap at http://lanyrd.com/ because people (in particular speakers) announce their participation in a conference months in advance - unlike social or entertainment events.

Tags: events, social-networks, quora, foursquare, plancast

Which social news websites for Python are out there?

2012-12-05T13:48:00+00:00

My answer to Which social news websites for Python are out there? on Quora

There's a Python subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/python

Tags: python, social-networks, quora

Did Mark Zuckerberg have any knowledge on building scalable social networks prior to starting work on Facebook?

2012-09-18T15:27:00+00:00

My answer to Did Mark Zuckerberg have any knowledge on building scalable social networks prior to starting work on Facebook? on Quora

I'm going to bet he didn't have this knowledge, simply because back when he launched Facebook in 2004 almost NO ONE had this knowledge - there simply weren't enough "web scale" products around for the patterns needed to run them to be widely discussed.

Today we're spoiled by the enormous amount of shared experience we have as a community in building large scalable systems, but back then it really was a case of each large scale site figuring everything out for themselves.

I bet he picked it up pretty fast though... nothing forces you to learn to scale faster than the experience of having your site stop working because too many people want to use it at the same time!

Tags: facebook, programming, scaling, social-networks, software-engineering, webapps, web-development, quora

How can you use SlideShare effectively to grow your professional reputation in a specific niche?

2012-08-24T17:43:00+00:00

My answer to How can you use SlideShare effectively to grow your professional reputation in a specific niche? on Quora

"How to integrate SlideShare activities with other social networks"

If you want to increase the visibility of your presentations, one thing you could do is ensure you have an up-to-date speaker profile on our service, Lanyrd. You can list the events you've spoken at and the talks you've given, then attach your SlideShare presentations.

If you do this, your talks will show up in a bunch of places - they'll be linked to from your Lanyrd profile, they'll be featured on the event page and they'll also show up on any topic pages relevant to the talk.

Here's an example: I gave a talk about Comet (a fore-runner to WebSockets) at an event back in 2008. Here's the session page on Lanyrd, with the embedded SlideShare presentation:

http://lanyrd.com/2008/skillswap...

The presentation also shows up as a thumbnail on our page about that event:

http://lanyrd.com/2008/skillswap...

And since it was about "Comet", it shows up in the slider widget at the top of our page about Comet as well:

http://lanyrd.com/topics/comet/

Finally, it's included in my overall speaker profile, along with all of my other talks:

http://lanyrd.com/profile/simonw/

Tags: networking, slideshare, social-networks, quora

Play Framework, Django or Rails? Which one do you recommend for Social Networking Web applications.

2012-01-14T09:22:00+00:00

My answer to Play Framework, Django or Rails? Which one do you recommend for Social Networking Web applications. on Quora

Both Rails and Django have been used for a large number of high profile social networking web applications. Off the top of my head, Django is used by Instagram and Pinterest, Rails is used by Posterous and Ravelry. I don't know what the largest sites built using Play are at the moment.

The hard problems involved in building a social network are essentially framework-agnostic: things like scaling an activity feed and running queries against large social graphs are solved by smart application architecture, not built-in framework functionality. Whether you use Rails, Django or Play will have almost no effect on how you solve those larger architectural challenges.

Pick the one you are most comfortable working with and start worrying about your site's functionality rather than its application framework.

Tags: django, frameworks, play, rails, social-networks, webapps, quora

What are good websites to post online content about an event?

2011-05-09T17:00:00+00:00

My answer to What are good websites to post online content about an event? on Quora

For posting slides from an event, http://www.slideshare.net/ is definitely the most popular. http://scribd.com/ is a good choice too.

For video, YouTube is a good option now that it has raised the length limit on videos. I've seen a lot of events use http://vimeo.com/ and http://blip.tv/ for their video hosting.

If you want to gather everything in one place, our site Lanyrd helps events link together media hosted on many different services. Here are a couple of examples of past events that we have content for:

http://lanyrd.com/2011/chicago-d...
http://lanyrd.com/2011/bcg11/
http://lanyrd.com/2010/atmedia/

Tags: community, events, social-networks, startups, quora

Quoting Blaine Cook

2009-08-13T13:06:46+00:00

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

— Blaine Cook

Tags: apple, blaine-cook, distributedsocialnetworks, facebook, social-networks, twitter

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice...

2009-05-22T00:49:34+00:00

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice...

Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets.

Tags: apple, appstore, iphone, londontube, malcolm-barclay, social-graph, social-networks, sockpuppets, tubedeluxe

The First Ten Things the New CEO of MySpace Should Do

2009-04-23T11:30:09+00:00

The First Ten Things the New CEO of MySpace Should Do

From the always thought provoking Jason Calacanis.

Tags: ceo, jason-calacanis, myspace, social-networks

Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy!

2007-09-21T23:36:15+00:00

Quechup: Another Social Network Enemy!

This is why we need to stop teaching users that it’s OK to give their e-mail username and password to any site that asks for it.

Tags: oauth, openid, quechup, social-networks, spam

Friends, Followers, and Notifications

2007-07-20T10:59:18+00:00

Friends, Followers, and Notifications

Twitter drops the confusing distinction between “friend” and “follow”—now it’s just “follow”. The less sites that demand I reduce friendship to a binary decision the better.

Tags: friending, social-networks, twitter

Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites

2006-12-24T19:32:53+00:00

Friends, friendsters, and top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites

I finally got around to reading this. Fascinating; lots to digest.

Tags: danah-boyd, myspace, social-networks, social-software