SNAPI, the Social Networking API

The really killer thing about Google Maps is the accessibility of the documentation, concepts and examples.

I'm currently putting SNAPI through it's paces to exploit Google Maps to create some awesome mashups.

A tutorial is now available on getting started with the SNAPI & Google Maps APIs and details the challenges involved with working examples. Enjoy!

Everyone's talking about it.

Web 2.0

By now you're probably thinking, 'What the hell is web 2.0 anyway?'

Well, it's your average online website experience, but on steroids.

Web 2.0 is the final collaboration of new emerging technologies and social thought from web-developers and system architects.

It's like strapping a whole community to your business, and enabling user-driven content, wrapped in with technologies such as flash and AJAX to provide media-rich, seamless experiences.

You will notice a surge in traffic, you will notice a surge in conversions.

And the bottom line is, if you're not 2.0 you're about to become a dinosaur.

According to eMarketer ;

A Melcrum study of communications at large firms found more than 40% are using podcasts and social networks, or say they are planning to do so.

It appears that only 8% of the Fortune 500, and 4% of the Global 1000 were using public blogs in 2005.

Public blogging has been measured at 5.8% for the Fortune 500 (29 firms) in 2005.

Assuming the Fortune 500 feature in the Global 1000, that would leave 40 companies blogging of the Fortune 500 in the top-half of the study.

From my previous experiences of setting up community sites i've found the most gratifying experience of all is watching the memberbase grow.

I would associate a growing memberbase with being sucessful, so intially I would launch sites consisting of only one page, the sign-up page.

I launched want2cam back in 2003, promoted the idea and waited for sign-ups.
It didn't really make sense launching an unbusy, member-less social networking site... I figured nobody would want to sign up to it!

The solution to this was to wait for 1000 sign-ups, and work on new features in the meantime. Once I reached the figure I would launch the basic stuff like profiles, and messaging.

I became rather surprised when it only took a week to reach the figure, the most inspiring trigger for quickly building the rest of the site.

I'd recommend starting off this way if you handle quite a few sites, you can measure which one is receiving the most interest, and work towards building that one up.

Which brings us to the first SNAPI tutorial, how to build a sign-up form using ASP.NET.

Just wanting to kick off the thought processes of everyone reading this new site...

It's been proven time and time again with technology that the general trend is for the developer to try and make the product accessible to the end-user

Calculators started their humble beginning taking up whole rooms as scientists would operate them with ticker-tape

Soon enough the scientists were able to bring the physical size down, and developers would begin exploiting the power of these machines to build on other technologies.

Nowadays you can fit a calculator into the palm of your hand, and it's accessible to everyone!

the state of play today

building a site that would host your image gallery, blog and list of friend's profile pages used to be the reserved task of the web developer

now it takes 2 minutes to set up a myspace profile, and anyone can do it... even your nan!

tomorrow

and so here comes our mission statement...

web developers today are tasked with creating online communities, job-listing sites, event management tools, image galleries, etc the list goes on...

what would happen if we provided developers with tools and code to build these systems 100 times faster?

what would happen if we made this technology accessible to web-designers?

what would happen if we gave it to the public in an easy to use form?

We want to make building the internet and the management of online services as easy as it is to use a calculator today, for everyone!

We are now publishing to the world!

Believe it or not, but this blog was built using 3 lines of code of ASP.NET C# and the SNAPI engine, please follow the tutorial to see how we did it!

The great thing about building the blog is that the content will hopefully accelerate the development of the community and the tool itself.

Commenting system to follow soon!