We continue publishing set of articles about interesting technology areas and solutions we have implemented or encountered in our projects.
This article briefly describes our experience in implement SoLoMo (SOcial LOcal MObile) app and service for Android and iPhone.
Solution
Recently we had a chance to work on a nice SoLoMo app and we’d like to share our approach to it.
The app had all required component for mobile social network. Let’s review them:
- Chat – as a good SoLoMo app, it should have a chat, chat groups, both text and audio-video. As mentioned in another article – we found great component for that – QuickBlox.
- GeoLocation and GeoSearch – using mobile services to detect user location is no big brainer. And Google API for Geo search of friends.
- Topics for discussion – for example local products and services is a nice way to create communities. And get revenue 😉 Tap into APIs of local shops and service providers, they will be happy to sign you up to that.
- Friends Finder – make a feature to find new friends by the common things you like. Usually it’s easy – just implement simple algorithm in the app. Need more sophisticated recommendation system? Sign up with popular recommendation engine/API. Or check Machine Learning courses on Coursera. Or ask us how to implement that 🙂
- Network growing – every SoLoMo app needs a way for users to invite other users. Every user of a social app loves to invite friends. That what makes it Social. So we use FriendsImporter component from http://saasiter.com/ to quickly implement the invitation/friends import part.
- Signup – all users want to sign up as quickly as possible and as we are aiming social people, most of them already have Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. We use our own component to single signon and user registration. But there is number of other APIs around (seems the same http://saasiter.com/ has social login library but we didn’t use it so not sure).
- Sharing – it’s a another core of any social app, adding new objects and sharing it with friends, sharing it to outside social networks like Facebook or Twitter. You can share things in two ways, by using simple javascript code to share a page, or you can upload and create a new post in other social networks. We did both in our apps, and only simple sharing here.
- Likes, stats, trends – that is something users love. They “like” objects in the app and on social network and bring more people to the discussion. Trends allow to see most popular things in your community. No one can miss it 🙂
So, is it all we need to make a good SoLoMo app? I guess it’s a bare minimum and a good start.
With your own ideas and core features – who knows, perhaps Facebook doesn’t stand a change.
