Ampersand - Alpha Release #1

[naathyn]

Hey guys, I kinda drift in and out of these boards; but I've come to get you guys' view on a Social Platform I am developing in Ruby (on Rails).

I am not here to recruit (as this isn't even an official website). It is currently being hosted on a Heroku server, which is a remote database giving developers a chance to test out their projects in development -- which is exactly what I am doing.

I am not going to rewrite the entire "About" or "Updates" section, although I strongly suggest you give the Updates page a gander.

I will, however, throw out some key features that have recently been developed:

news feed: much like facebook and twitter, only the posts of the members you follow will show up in your news feed.

@replies: "@naathyn hey what's up!" will appear in your public feed but show up in naathyn's private feed (vice versa) whether you are following him or not. He, in return, is given the opportunity to "@reply" you back.

gravatar: if the email you are using has a Gravatar, the site will fetch it and use it as your avatar. You are able to obtain a Gravatar in your Account Profile.

As of now, those are the highlights, but I encourage you to read more about future developments on the Updates page.

If you are so kind to be apart of this development (and possibly beta test it as it is being developed) you may do so by visiting this link.

Its security is tight-knit, so if you are wanting to use &'s features you must register. Knowing all of you aren't going to do that, I have set up a dummy account that you may utilize and test out in any way you wish.

Username: thatguy
Password: ladygaga!

I'd love to hear your comments/questions/concerns/opinions :great:

-Nathan

 

[Fergal]

Re: &mpersand - My `Twitter-Like` Experiment

Hi Nathan, well done and congratulations on getting that up and running. I'm sure you learned a lot during the process and I hope it goes very well for you.

What was your reason for setting it up, was it to improve your programming or do you want it to be commercially successful? If you have commercial objectives for the project, my first suggestion would be that you will need to find a way that you are different and better than Twitter.

 

[naathyn]

Re: &mpersand - My `Twitter-Like` Experiment

Hi Fergal,

To be honest, I was really interested in the Ruby programming language, and just decided I would learn it.

I wanted to make a simple guestbook just to test the waters and found out not only was it simple to make... it looked nice too!

As you might know, Twitter released "Twitter Bootstrap" which, if you don't know, is precombiled CSS and javascript to be used in developers' sites. There is a "gem" in ruby you can install that will allow Twitter's bootstrap into your theme. (Twitter is designed on Ruby)

After reading about bootstrap... while looking at my simple guestbook with mounds of potential, I decided to do more and more research, digging at an answer on how to "mimic" twitter.

It was all just fun and games and was I merely experimenting... but as development progressed I realized I have half-way met my goal.

As you say, it is time to figure out how to make it different than twitter... that is on my mind now, and I am definitely taking suggestions. Like I say, groups for one, but I am still racking my brain.

Thanks for your input!

 

[Fergal]

Re: &mpersand - My `Twitter-Like` Experiment

Well done Nathan, it sounds like a great learning experience. Hopefully some of our members will give you helpful suggestions as to how to move forward.

 

[naathyn]

Thanks Fergal...

I suppose this is considered a "mini-bump". I am doing this because I have decided I am going to host this and try to push it to a global audience.

Basically this the platform is stable and ready for testing. Basically what this means is, I need people people to use it in order to find its flaws. If anyone would be interested in doing that, it would help out greatly.

Also the updates have changed 10-fold. There is a video on the homepage showing its basic features.

Thanks to anyone who might participate!

 

[Fergal]

Nice video Nathan, the service looks great. Hope it goes very well.

 

[naathyn]

Thanks man, I appreciate your input a lot. It's going real well as of now. It amazed me to see as many people as they did join it. It also amazed me how many things I needed to fix once it started becoming active.

 

[krihol]

Nice! I Signed up. And i love the video btw 😉

 

[naathyn]

Thanks man 😀