Social Network Developers

Jivaldi has been knee deep in Social Networks for the last couple years.  No, we haven’t just been posting updates on our Facebook & Twitter accounts; we’ve been building a social network for a start-up company and also building tools that integrate into these networks.

So let us be honest, there is really no difference between developers that develop websites and applications and ones that work on social networks like we have.  As long as the team is good, it really doesn’t matter what we’re building.  Nevertheless, having someone familiar with common issues that arise and challenges that developers face when trying to build usable tools for a lot of people – well this is certainly an advantage.

We are currently as part of a development team for a start-up company called Rjenda -  a school-oriented, workload/scheduling platform that is built upon a  social framework.  You can check it out here. We’re working with everything from the UI, UX and back end.

Lately we’ve received several calls from people looking to start their own social network.  While we are excited to get these calls, we think we might be able to help you focus your initial goals when looking at building a social network.  So here are some things to keep in mind.

• If you are contacting a company and asking how much does it cost to build a social network, you may be asking the wrong question.  Instead, it would help to ask ‘how long’ it will take to build this network. Developing a good, attractive and sustainable destination for your users is not something that happens overnight.
• One question to ask of your team before reaching out to an agency and their development team is whether you are hiring the agency to help create a strategy for the application and build the thought process that will power the application, usability...etc?  Or, do you already have this drawn up and you simply need someone to develop it based on your project document.  The reason we ask this is because in certain cases the client will come to us with only the ‘thought’ of an application in their head (nothing on paper) and ask what it costs to build. 
• Jivaldi has been building applications for 10 years and let’s just say that not all developers/teams are alike. :-) In the end, you can save yourself a lot time, money and headaches if you hire a development team that truly ‘gets’ what you are trying to do.  Understanding the ‘soul’ of the application and how you want your users to interact with it, this intangible attribute is probably the most important skill set (or mindset) that you could ask of a development team.  This results in intelligent & usable design.
• Remember that all good agencies have been working on the front lines of this industry and have come to understand user behavior, things to do (not to do) and how to get online users to do things that we want them to.  So if you can really define what you are hiring an agency for, e.g. consulting, strategy, UI design, development (hopefully all of the above) then this will really help in your efforts to land the right team.

We hope these points help and we looking forward to meeting you.