Social Networks R Us
While we’ve been involved in community sites for a long time, the recent explosion of true social network sites has been really exciting for us. While communities may differ, the fundamentals of social networks don’t vary much. People want to post cool things they have, they want to find people with similar interests, and they want to talk about things they’re interested in. We’ve been talking to a lot of folks recently who want to start social networks, and the response has been great since we already have the core social network functionality built and ready to use. We can cut deployment timelines and because we’re doing development in Ruby on Rails, we can still offer a very customized user experience.
Focusing on a niche like social networks and social media sites makes a lot of sense for us. We have experience with multiple sites, code we can re-use for shorter developments, and excitement about the kind of sites we’re building. CRM, inventory management and back office applications certainly pay well and have some interesting technical challenges, but we’d much rather build something cool that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will enjoy.
Of course we can still parley our years of experience doing other kinds of applications, social networks rarely stand alone, but it’s great to finally have some apps that more than a couple hundred people ever see. Maybe when we roll out our first 100,000 member social network we’ll throw some sort of party and invite everybody in Austin. It may be sooner than we think. Viva la community!