Programming Social Applications

When Good Applications Go Bad

Even with the developer’s best intentions, sometimes a good application can fail because of improper architecture, not having enough room to scale, or by not leveraging the social tools available to it. But with a little bit of planning before the development actually begins, developers can build an application core that can scale, makes use of available social hooks to drive traffic, and will make money in the long run.

Before beginning an application project, developers should ask themselves a series of questions:

• What is our intended audience? Do we plan to expand to additional audiences or languages?

• How are we planning to scale the server backbone to handle traffic spikes if the application becomes popular?

• What social features of the container can we use in the application to drive traffic and new user installs?

• How can we monetize the application?

These are just some of the basic questions that we should ask and answer before development even begins. It’s important to lay a good foundation and plan for the future.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few use cases that have some inherent issues in their development practices.