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My Social Networking Website. In progress, looking for suggestions


shortysbest

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I have been working on a social networking website in my free time for the past 2 months and I am looking for suggestions for my website. I have started out basing it from facebook, however as I continue to work on it I am working to make it all together different, and of course better.

If you have suggestions for features or anything please let me know, you can post it here, or directly on my profile! www.kithell.com/#/profile&id=1

 

Some of the current features:

*Friends

*Mutual Friends

*Basic Info

*Profile Picture Upload

*Realtime post updates

*Post links from youtube and instantly embeds video information

*Watch Youtube videos and browse through any page without interrupting the video playback

**Hide the video and continue listening to it

*Email notifications for new posts and friend requests

*Filter posts on yours, or any other profiles to find what you want

*Search for friends, or just browse for them (must have an account)

*Realtime Online status. (Online, Away, Offline) & Last seen date

*Delete posts, and restore removed posts

etc.

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i like the responsiveness ajax stuff. Although if someone has no javascript there is no alternative page view.

and maybe give the message boxes a little space above them right now it feels as if it squeezed all to getter.

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First and foremost, thank you for your feedback.

"I like the responsiveness ajax stuff.": Thank you, from the very beginning I made my mind up that I wanted a website precisely like this, completely ajaxed based which is the only way a social networking website could be successful, it makes everything so much faster and smoother.

 

"Although if someone has no javascript there is no alternative page view.": Yes, that's unfortunate, however if they don't have javascript then I think most social networking websites are out of the question for them anyways.

 

"and maybe give the message boxes a little space above them right now it feels as if it squeezed all to getter.": I had an additional 5px padding above and below the posts before, however I thought they were too spaced out and you couldn't see enough posts, I feel most people would like to see more content from friends, and less whitespace, at least that's my preference. However I do plan on adding the ability to comment and such on posts which if I design that feature how I have planned in my head, it would give extra space between them.

 

Thanks again for your feedback fellow Php Freak.

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no problem :)

And your right on the fact that ajax is the way to go. If i am right there are quite some Big A Brands out there that already just ignore people that don't have javascript.

 

Might be nice to tell it to those visitors though. <noscript> "dear vistor, in order to use bla bla bla, or fire your admin"

 

as far as spacing, tastes differ, just make it better than facebook  ;D

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Haha, yeah, Facebook's failures have inspired Kithell lol. Facebook has been slowly turning me away from their site, they are changing/adding features that I think are just ridiculous, plus there is just too much spam on there now (IE news feed and such). As I am still in Highschool I get to listen to many people complain about Facebook and say what they wish it did or didn't have, so I have been taking those factors into account, as well as personal preference. In a perfect world Kithell would be the new Facebook, and I would be the New (younger) Mark Zuckerburg lol.

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Hey let me ask you something, maybe you know the answer, maybe not. Do you know if in a chat (such as facebooks chat, which epically fails), whether it's better to store the chat in a .txt, or on the database? I'm assuming the reason for a .txt document would be because of the massive number of rows it would take in the database.

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well, a database is designed for that purpose, and if you make all kinds of textfiles, i am pretty sure you have a privacy breach there. Not sure though I am more a css dude  ;D

besides that i guess you can remove inactive rows, after a while with a cronjob. But a textfile is not a good solution. you need to open read write close and that for every time you type "how you doing?" But I leave this to the experts, My brains just say this, but i had a beer :D

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usr: PhpFreak@yahoo.com

pass: phpfreaklogin

 

To make your passwords more secure, I suggest that you use a (one way) md5 encryption with a salt. This will also make it case-sensitive.

 

Read more about salting your passwords here.

I suggest that you also use dynamic salts.

 

 

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Sorry, I was in the middle of upgrading the security of the passwords, it is up and running now.

 

That's a good question :P, well I have been basing some of the things off facebook, but keeping them as far away from facebook as I can, and continue to change them so they are better and not like facebook, I'm not great with coming up with ideas on the spot, I'm more of I have to use it to see how it works, and change it when the ideas come to me. I'm trying to make it much more simple to use, and a cleaner design. The website is a work in progress which will build itself over time lol, so much of the details I don't really have. I do know that with the time I can make a website that is better than facebook, as I have done this much work already with about 9 months of on and off, after school programming experience.

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The functionality is top, I don't know how old you are but when you mean with "school" high school then I'd say you could already work for companies, you're already building functionalities like the top guys.

 

The designing needs a bit more improvement though, as suggested some of the spacings are a bit off and don't look pleasing enough to the eye.

 

I also think that "mutual friends" could create conflicts between people in their social interactions. "What I'm not in your mutual friends?" or "Put me in your mutual friends, I put you, put me too. etc." Similar to how it was with MySpace and the Top Friends, but I think the problem with MySpace was that it had a limitation of how many top friends you can have, if you don't put a limitation to the mutual friends feature (or the limit is broad enough) then it could work fine. People will simply add those people they feel a little bit more bounded to next to their best friends. Just some things to consider.

 

Another tip I'd give is, once you have a solid framework done, bring some other people on board, don't be a Do It All Yourself (something I struggle with too lol), build relationships with SEO experts, marketers, designers, learn to build a team and work with them.

 

Good luck.

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Thank you very much! I'm 18, just a few weeks short of graduation. Started doing this stuff around a year ago this time. As for the design aspect, yes I agree it isn't very great, I'm happy with it, but I'm not thrilled with it. One of the factors is that I haven't really got enough features in it to build around the design, it's still pretty bare, I am continually working to improve it though. (you should see how bad the design and everything was just 3 weeks ago lol) I have about 12 versions, almost all of them completely different from another hah. I spent more time making new versions than adding functions to it, but now I'm sticking to this one to get things done.

For your mutual friends concern, I'm not sure if you know exactly what that means? Mutual friends are just friends you and the user both have added, it's not a "top friend" system. I'm not having a "top friend" system either, because of the reasons you listed.

For bringing other people in, I would like to do that, I actually started a social networking website with another person, but he lives across the world so it was difficult to stay on top of everything. It would be nice to have someone that knew more than I knew, and lived near me, however where I live there's not a single person I know that can do any high level work.

 

Again thanks for your feedback, Would love for you, or anyone else to make your own account and keep me updated on my progress :P

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i really like the site a lot, and as you stated, it needs a bit more of a punchy front end design but far as all the features and stuff in the ajax style, i'm really loving it.

i just wished i had a fraction of your skills at that age! you should do well in a career as a developer!

 

 

 

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