Book description
Building a web application that attracts and retains regular visitors is tricky enough, but creating a social application that encourages visitors to interact with one another requires careful planning. This book provides practical solutions to the tough questions you'll face when building an effective community site -- one that makes visitors feel like they've found a new home on the Web.
If your company is ready to take part in the social web, this book will help you get started. Whether you're creating a new site from scratch or reworking an existing site, Building Social Web Applications helps you choose the tools appropriate for your audience so you can build an infrastructure that will promote interaction and help the community coalesce. You'll also learn about business models for various social web applications, with examples of member-driven, customer-service-driven, and contributor-driven sites.
- Determine who will be drawn to your site, why they'll stay, and who they'll interact with
- Create visual design that clearly communicates how your site works
- Build the software you need versus plugging in one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf apps
- Manage the identities of your visitors and determine how to support their interaction
- Monitor demand from the community to guide your choice of new functions
- Plan the launch of your site and get the message out
Publisher resources
Table of contents
- Building Social Web Applications
- Dedication
- Preface
- 1. Building a Social Application
- 2. Analyzing, Creating, and Managing Community Relationships
- 3. Planning Your Initial Site
- 4. Creating a Visual Impact
- 5. Working with and Consuming Media
- 6. Managing Change
-
7. Designing for People
- Making Software for People
- Interaction Design
- Identify Needs with Personas and User-Centered Design
- Common Techniques for UCD
- Running Interaction Design Projects
- Using Agile and UCD Methods
- Beyond UCD
- Learning to Love Constraints
- Including You, Me, and Her Over There, Plus Him, Too
- Moving Quickly from Idea to Implementation
- Don’t Let Your Users Drown in Activity
- Implementing Search
- Understanding Activity and Viewpoints
- Twelve Ideas to Take Away
- Summary
- 8. Relationships, Responsibilities, and Privacy
- 9. Community Structures, Software, and Behavior
- 10. Social Network Patterns
- 11. Modeling Data and Relationships
- 12. Managing Identities
- 13. Organizing Your Site for Navigation, Search, and Activity
- 14. Making Connections
-
15. Managing Communities
- Social Behavior in the Real World
- Starting Up and Managing a Community
- Trolls and Other Degenerates
- Separating Communities
- Encouraging Good Behavior
- Gaming the System
- Membership by Invitation or Selection
- Rewarding Good Behavior
- Helping the Community Manage Itself
- Balancing Anonymity and Pseudo-Anonymity
- Summary
-
16. Writing the Application
- Small Is Good: A Reprise
- How Social Applications Differ from Web Applications
- Agile Methodologies
- Deployment and Version Control
- Infrastructure and Web Operations
- Designing Social Applications
- Your App Has Its Own Point of View
- How Code Review Helps Reduce Problems
- Beyond the Web Interface, Please
- Bug Tracking and Issue Management
- Rapid User Interfaces
- Scaling and Messaging Architectures
- Implementing Search
- Identity and Management of User Data
- Federation
- Making Your Code Green and Fast
- Building Admin Tools and Gleaning Collective Intelligence
- Summary
-
17. Building APIs, Integration, and the Rest of the Web
- “On the Internet” Versus “In the Internet”
- Making Your Place Within the Internet
- Why an API?
- Being Open Is Good
- Arguing for Your API Internally
- Implementing User Management and Open Single Sign-On
- Designing an API
- Comparing Social APIs
- Reviewing the APIs
- Managing the Developer Community
- Create an API?
- Summary
-
18. Launching, Marketing, and Evolving Social Applications
- Loving and Hating the Home Page
- Financing Your Site
- Marketing
- Achieving and Managing Critical Mass
-
Evolving Your Site
- Remaining in Beta
- Balancing Feature Requests and Issue Management
- Adding Functionality
- Build Something New or Refine the Old?
- Adding Functionality After Refining
- Watching for What Your Community Demands
- Keeping Up with the Competition (or Not)
- Avoiding Feature-Led Development
- Encouraging Data-Supported Development
- Making Useful Products (Experience-Led)
- Determining When a Bug Is a Bug
- Staying Focused and Coherent
- Planning for Redesigns and Refactoring
- Establishing the Rhythm of Your Evolving Application
- Summary
- Index
- About the Author
- Colophon
- Copyright
Product information
- Title: Building Social Web Applications
- Author(s):
- Release date: September 2009
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 9780596518752
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