Abhi Yerra

So I wrote a Facebook App and released it finally. It’s called ithinkyourecute which was inspired by my friend Andrea. The idea behind it is simple. Say you are seeing someone and are interested in dating him or her, but you don’t know whether to take it to the next level. This app hopes to help people with this predicament. If you mark someone as “cute” and in return that person marks you as “cute” then you know you are good to go.

I wrote it in Ruby on Rails using the rfacebook gem which made it quite easy and only took a few hours. The hard part was design which I have no aptitude for.

I am hosting it on Joyent Accelerator using ngnix and mongrel_cluster. I wanted to use Apache with mod_rails, but that didn’t work out as I was constantly getting an error which I didn’t have time to debug. I hope to eventually move it to that as it’d make deploying a whole lot easier, but I’m not complaining.

The Joyent Accelerator I am using is a part of the free accelerator that is being given out to facebook developers so eventually I might go back to using Slicehost, but for right now it is fine.

Google recently released Google Friend Connect which is supposed to compete with Facebook Connect. Whereas, Facebook is going for the big fish, Google seems to be going after the little guys. Sites that tend to be static, which can now have a bit more “social” added to them.

This is exactly how the technology feels. It is as simple as downloading a few files putting them in the root of your app, and copying and pasting some JavaScript. It uses OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial to do its thing. Further, you can use OpenSocial Apps within your site, so you have an OpenSocial container with little effort.

However, this all comes at a cost: you don’t control the information. Everything is stored on Google’s end. Maybe in the future they will open up to give more access to the various information they collect, but right now it’s a closed box. This makes sense for small sites, but larger sites will want information residing with them and not some third party so it is not advisable for that group.

However, for small sites such as blogs, small merchants and communities this could be a great tool as it makes it possible for every static site out there to now become a “social network.”