Discuss about the Social Networking Web Application.
The man has an innate need to connect with fellow men and has been doing so within the constraints and technology of the times. In the current times, thanks to the Internet, geography and time zones have been made a non-factor as far as communication and sharing of data is concerned. However, the base Internet (and the World Wide Web on top of it) provide only a platform on which applications may be built to utilise the technologies i.e. unless we have a software hosted on the Internet, exploiting the facilities furnished by the Internet for meeting user requirements is not possible.
This project is a step in the direction of providing a platform for allowing people to communicate over the World Wide Web using a website. The opportunity is allowing individuals and groups to interact with one another, share data (photos, videos, documents, presentations) 24×7 and to anyone on Earth with due regards to privacy. This project proposal will detail the plan, areas for investigation, background research, literature review, deliverables.
This paper is a project proposal for a social networking website/web application using the public Internet. The aim of the endeavour is to exploit the features of Internet (and World Wide Web built on top of it) to develop a platform for near-instant communication among people, groups and organisations with due regards to privacy.
Communication is an inherent need of every human being. People communicate for basic survival, to cooperate as well as to bond (Tomasello, 2010). This core requirement of interaction (whether a face-to-face meeting, voice call, video call, letter, email or chat) is the reason that a punishment like solitary confinement (Grassian, 2006) breaks the most steadfast criminals also. Also, Internet and World Wide Web have revolutionised the human way of living. In fact, United Nations has included Internet access in fundamental human rights (Sandle, 2016). The facilities provided by the Internet technologies provide for a rich amalgamation of media like text, images, audio, video to create applications that not only fulfil a real requirement (and thus have the potential to be profitable) but also be visually attractive and delighting the user with its intuitive experience.
These are the motivations for this project – fulfilling a fundamental human need on top of a game-changer technology with a delightful user experience, and with the potential to become profitable.
The project is about enabling people to interact. Thus, to build a useful product, the first areas of investigation will be to define our target users. Next, exploring will be done on the way people communicate, the way the Internet has modified the perceptions and expectations of communication, privacy concerns. Also, an estimate will be made about the susceptibility of our target users to either start using an online network or migrate from an existing one if they are already using one. Next, we will explore user experience, and human-computer interaction specifically using the Internet. Then after evaluating various Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), one will be chosen for developing this project. Finally, we will investigate programming languages (client-side, server-side, database, design) as to their suitability and future scalability.
Major service providers have saturated social networking and thus it may be challenging for a new entrant to gain a foothold. However, the available alternatives also make the competition research easier. Also, many websites have followed the cycle of growth, decay and then dying, which helps us in identifying patterns to help ensure success and avoid mistakes already done. In this background research, we have evaluated the user experience of social networking sites Hi5, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn. Also, we have searched the Internet for user reviews of the mentioned social networks to gain insights into users’ minds. Next, we evaluated the support available for developing, designing, hosting and maintaining such an application. We are happy to report that a lot of free resources and support is available. The resources include documentations with easy search facility, API (Application Programming Interface) explorers, forums (e.g. StackOverflow), readymade scripts for the common tasks in web development and design. We are also considering the use of programming language frameworks which provide a general base to build our custom code on. Frameworks can save much effort, due to the availability of debugged code ready to be plugged in our custom application (Brooks, 1995).
Social networking is an important concept in today’s world and has been at the forefront of cultural and political movements. A popular social media site, Twitter, was used in thwarting the attempted military coup in Turkey (El-Erian, 2016). For implementing the design of the website, we will be taking occasional guidance from Niederst Robbins (2012). These days, user expectations from any product – online or offline are great and ever-increasing. The harsh criticisms of users shoot down all but the most meticulously designed products. To help us in designing better and delightful user experiences, we will be referencing the classic by Norman (1988), “The Psychology of Everyday Things”. The fundamentals of any field do not age with time, and even if technology changes, people do not. To help in the programming implementation, we look forward to the helpful community of professional and hobbyist programmers at StackOverflow (“Stack Overflow”, 2017). Also, for managing the cross-browser inconsistencies we look up to the authors at CSS-Tricks (“Search Results | CSS-Tricks”, 2017). Also, we would like our users to stick to our site and keep using it. To help in this, we will learn from research in this direction by Chang & Zhu (2012). Next, we will learn from an analysis of two major players in this field – Twitter and Facebook by Hughes, Rowe, Batey, & Lee (2012). Finally, we will analyse the uses to which the major service providers are put by users and extrapolate those users to our software and judge our capabilities to meet them.
This project is about developing software. This software will run on the Internet. We will be entering a competitive market, and this will reflect upon our methodology. As mentioned above, we will evaluate the current service providers, users’ reviews and form a basic core set of functionality for the initial version. We will do an object-oriented design of the software and take help of tools like the class diagram. Then we will create a relational database schema in software like MySQL Workbench. For development, we are leaning towards iterative approach with regular internal testing (Alpha testing) before launching the product for Beta testing. We will attempt to make the site as cross-browser compatible as possible. We will integrate third-party widgets for user feedback. Additionally, analytics will be collected using Google Analytics. For web hosting, a decision between shared hosting, bare-metal cloud hosting (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS) or a wrapper cloud service (Platform as a Service, PaaS) is pending. Also, we will use version control (most likely Git) to maintain versions of the software code.
This project is a communications tool and will enable people and groups to communicate in near-instant without any regards to geographical distance or time zone. What our users talk about, share photos or videos about is not our responsibility per se. This absolution is fair since our service is like the services of telephone and mobile carriers. With our programming and other tasks involved in the project, we will not be in a position to bring any animal, individual or a group to harm. Thus, for this project, there is no requirement of any ethical clearance.
This project’s primary functionality is expected to take less than three months of a single developer’s time. The detailed plan is as follows considering an industry-standard of eight working hours. However, other commitments may not allow eight hours worth of work in a single workday. We can expend extra effort can on weekends and holidays. Thus, we are aware that the time estimated may turn out to be slightly less than the fact. The investigation and selection of a development method may take three to four days. Development, designing, debugging, version control of the application may take about eight weeks. Documentation will take about a week. Alpha testing and the consequent debugging may take another week. Launching may take one to two three days to stabilise the application. Then, every three or four days, we will do maintenance to correct any bugs discovered. Also, we will be providing support to the user as and when concerns are received.
This software project’s deliverables will include the code in the programming language selected, digital assets (e.g. images), database schema, original database file, configurations for servers. Beyond this core set of records, the deliverables include documentation (user and technical), test suites, test results, planning documents and any other documents created in the implementation of the project.
Reference List
Brooks, F. (1995). The mythical man month (1st ed.). Reading, Mass. [u.a.]: Addison-Wesley.
Chang, Y. & Zhu, D. (2012). The role of perceived social capital and flow experience in building users’ continuance intention to social networking sites in China. Computers In Human Behavior, 28(3), 995-1001. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.01.001
El-Erian, M. (2016). How Social Media Helped Defeat the Turkish Coup. Bloomberg View. Retrieved 7 January 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-18/how-social-media-helped-defeat-the-turkish-coup
Grassian, S. (2006). Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement. Washington University Journal Of Law & Policy, 22. Retrieved from https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1362&context=law_journal_law_policy
Hughes, D., Rowe, M., Batey, M., & Lee, A. (2012). A tale of two sites: Twitter vs. Facebook and the personality predictors of social media usage. Computers In Human Behavior, 28(2), 561-569. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.11.001
Niederst Robbins, J. (2012). Learning Web Design (1st ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates.
Norman, D. (1988). The psychology of everyday things (1st ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Search Results | CSS-Tricks. (2017). CSS-Tricks. Retrieved 7 January 2017, from https://css-tricks.com/search-results/?q=cross+browser
Sandle, T. (2016). UN thinks internet access is a human right. Business Insider. Retrieved 7 January 2017, from https://www.businessinsider.com/un-says-internet-access-is-a-human-right-2016-7?IR=T
Stack Overflow. (2017). Stackoverflow.com. Retrieved 7 January 2017, from https://stackoverflow.com/
Tomasello, M. (2010). Origins of human communication (1st ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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