Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site

by Gavin Bell

Building a web application that attracts and retains regular visitors is tricky enough, but creating a social application that encourages visitors to interact with one another requires careful planning. This book provides practical solutions to the tough questions you'll face when building an effective community site -- one that makes visitors feel like they've found a new home on the Web.

If your company is ready to take part in the social web, this book will help you get started. Whether you're creating a new site from scratch or reworking an existing site, Building Social Web Applications helps you choose the tools appropriate for your audience so you can build an infrastructure that will promote interaction and help the community coalesce. You'll also learn about business models for various social web applications, with examples of member-driven, customer-service-driven, and contributor-driven sites.

Genres: Reference, Software, Web, Computers, Technology, Design, Engineering

432 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2008

Reviews

[Troy Swinehart · Rating 2 out of 5]

My focus is wavering from my intent for 2012...it was leaders and their influence on the world through tech or otherwise.....but given the factors in my world I am moving on. Papa's got a brand new bag.....

New iPad so I can actually start reading again....surprised how much I missed that damn thing. All better now....

So I am always a little skeptical when I start in on a new technology book, especially on a topic as open ended as social web applications. But I must say I was very happy with this selection by Gavin Bell. Specifically I was looking for a deeper level discussion on the concepts/conversations - without getting lost (after all I have been in management for a number of years and I'm not that bright!).

The span of the material was appropriate to an accomplished developer and director, such as myself. Gavin provides sufficient depth of technical detail to wet-your-whisle. In this area I found my self drifting off for random spans of time to do side research based on the volume of outside references Gavin provides. Also providing real world examples, thought these tend to get a little redundant. Given that the book was a 2009 printing I would expect the 2nd edition to have many more social web applications to cite as examples.

This is a great read and if you are interested in getting your hands dirty with social web apps I would advise putting this on your list as a primer book.

Now off to get some of the details to satisfy my crazy developer side!

[William Cline · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought this book hoping it would offer a set of "best practices" for designing Web applications. Unfortunately, most of the book's ideas were old news to me. An active Web user will have already seen them in practice many times. Rather than a collection of advice and good practices, Building Social Web Applications is really more of a "list of things to think about". That list might be useful to a novice, but the information is so general or vague that it would be hard for a novice to apply.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't usually list the computer-related books unless I've read them cover to cover, which I rarely do. But this one I think I've gone through twice. Lots in this is seemingly obvious, and there are a lot of things I'd see him be a big more definitive on, but there's still a lot in here. Lots of times, he says something and remarks that it's common sense, but many of those times I've seen lots of failed counterexamples.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate to say this, because I know and like both the author and the editor, but this book is difficult to read. The author has indulgent explanations (e.g., uses the word "bespoke" and then has a sidebar pointing to the Off The Cuff blog, which has nothing to do with the topic at hand), and the editor didn't fix it. I wanted to read, but found it too jarring. :(

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading it now. It's fantastic book...

[Agustin Colchado · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't complete this book that I received free from a conference. It was pretty high level and not what I was hoping it would cover.