viibee - a Rich Internet Application for Dating within various Social Networks
I recently listened to a talk given by the cofounder and lead programmer of viibee, Michael Marth at the internet briefing conference in the world trade center in Zurich.
Viibee is an RIA dating application, giving users the possibility to upload videos of themselves. They’re trying to bring the fun factor back to dating and they say hearing and seeing a person speak is much more fun and tells you more about a person than reading through countless more or less boring profiles.
In his presentation, Michael Marth showed us how they built viibee, Rich Internet Application focused on Dating with flex and ruby on rails. Then he showed us how they integrated their application into existing social networks like facebook, myspace, friendster and orkut.
Here’s a couple of things Michael said:
Facebook integration is very easy and powerful, because there is
- good support of swf files
- a large developer community and good documentation
- interaction with facebook is server side (there’s a rails plugin called rfacebook)
Orkut integration proved more painful due to
- Opensocial is JS based, so FlexJS Bridge was needed and embedCachedFlash, which apparently is still buggy
- Caching on the side of the social network makes testing more difficult
but has a good support of developers (well, google is a developers’ company)
Myspace has a good developer support but
- you have to use MySpace Content Delivery Network so that caching strategy and expiry remain unclear
- you have to use a proprietary Flash Lib, the opensocial JS API has been “extended”
He has only used the client side integration of Myspace (opensocial) and has not yet tried the Myspace REST API, which is quite powerful, because it allows you to integrate on the server side.
Friendster (interesting that people are still considering it, according to google trends the trend is upward, contrary to myspace and orkut)
- no good developer support
- API is based on REST, means the integration is server side but there’s no ruby library available
- opensocial is promised
- apps are within iframes, so you can easily include an swf file
- mostly functional “as advertised”
It would be interesting to have same developer experiences from networks like hi5 or bebo, which both have also launched APIs and are becoming more and more important in the Social Networking space.
He also noted that the virality, like using notifications, news feeds and emails are very specific to the individual social network.
Was it worth it? Michael says yes, very much so. A lot of their rapidly growing number of users are using the application exclusively within their preferred social network.