TechCrunch had a great overview of some top turnkey SNS providers a week or so ago. They plan to also do a review soon of some downloadable solutions and custom providers.

The three loyal readers of my blog know I had a writeup a while back of free/cheap SNS tools. phpFox, Dolphin, & Handshakes are pretty popular. Elgg is big in the education field. Pligg (and its many cousins under the Affero GPL license) is more of a Digg clone, but people keep mentioning it. And there are a bunch more.

A lot of them are written in PHP, so if you're handy with code, you can often get open source platforms to do what you want/need them to do. But remember that if you use open source software as a foundation for your startup, you may be required to release any modifications you make to that codebase. Various factors affect that, of course.

Open source exists to help people ramp up & leverage the work of a community, but comes with a stipulation that if you modify and/or try to profit from that work, you often have to release your enhancements back to the community. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as your business plan takes that into account. There are plenty of companies who build or leverage open source, help the community, and yet still make money doing it.

Good article on WindowSecurity.com about securing RDP using SSL. Important for PCI Compliance & better security in general.

Note that if you already have an SSL certificate from GeoTrust, etc. you can just use that certificate instead of creating a new one.

To do so:

• Under Request TLS/SSL certificate:
• For step 10 you'd choose "Import" and pick your existing SSL cert & allow the storage location based on the cert.
• Skip steps 11-14
• Under Configure the Workstation
• Skip steps 1-4 about importing the certificate
• You can download the latest RDP Connection software (version 6) here.

I just noticed on Mosso's FAQ that they now support .NET 2.0 & .NET 3.0. That's good news, since when I looked at them before they only supported ASP.NET 1.1.

FYI Mosso is a hosting provider targeted towards designers & developers that want to resell hosting to their clients. They're interesting in a few ways. First off, they offer "True Hybrid" technology, allowing you to run PHP and ASP.NET sites from the same set of files. So you can FTP some PHP files and some ASP.NET files into the same directory on your account, and they'll both work (they can't talk to each other, though). They also offer 24/7 support & automated billing services that you can resell for your clients.

IMO their hosting offering is a bit pricey -- $100/mo, which could get you a few VPSes at other hosts. But again, they're hoping that their billing, support, PHP/ASP.NET hybrid servers, and turnkey process will win them some business. I know from experience that sometimes saving $20-50/month ends up costing you far more than that in lost time. So, we'll see.

BTW I am not a current Mosso customer -- I just think their offering is unique & interesting. :)

Marc Andreessen's synopsis of the facebook platform/API is a good read for would-be social developers. Not that developers are social, er, I mean developers for social networks.

Favorite quote from Marc's article (emphasis mine):

"[W]hen your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up."

He's referring to iLike's explosion in particular, but it's good to remember that if you introduce something compelling in a huge, extremely viral environment, you can get a lot of traffic very quickly. Probably a good idea to have the phone numbers of a few content delivery networks ready.

You can now scroll more easily through data in Excel 2007, as told in IM chat form (inspired by 37 signals' Fireside Chat posts). BWS = me, DSM = Scott.

[08:46] BWS: heh Excel 2007 has a cool new feature
[08:46] BWS: when you're dragging a cell down
[08:46] BWS: you know how the further you move your mouse, the faster it drags & scrolls?
[08:46] DSM: yah
[08:47] DSM: and then you whizz past where you want to go
[08:47] BWS: yes
[08:47] BWS: well in older Excel I would always end up scrolling too fast & going way beyond the last row of data
[08:47] BWS: well
[08:47] BWS: it now automatically slows down the scrolling
[08:47] BWS: when you get to the end
[08:47] DSM: nice
[08:47] BWS: kinda like how at a gas pump, if you prepay for an amount it automatically slows down
[08:47] DSM: yeah
[08:47] BWS: I think I will blog about this new scrolling thing

 

Saw this small gem on my LinkedIn Answers network. Someone asked about developing widgets to be used in social networking platforms. Nice answer from Frank Speiser:

This isn't an answer to your specific question, but there's a lot to worry about with compliance for the various social networking platforms out there. Once you build it, you need to maintain it, which is easily more work than actually building it.

You'd do yourself a favor by integrating with Clearspring (www.clearspring.com), RockYou (www.rockyou.com) or Kickapps (www.kickapps.com) to manage the actual bridge to the social networks and community syndication sites. As a plus, these providers may be able to get you placement in widget galleries that you can not get for yourself.

SubSonic is an open source project loosely modeled after Rails. It uses BuildProviders to automatically generate the DAL/ORM code at compile time, meaning you don't have to manually regenerate code every time your database schema changes.

The downside was that the code was only auto-generated for Web Site projects, not Web Application or Class Library projects. So Rob Conery has a recent post about using Pre-build Steps to autogenerate the SubSonic code for all types of projects.

So, read the "What will it do for me?" on the SubSonic home page, and check out the first 5-10 minutes of a recent screencast. If you like what you see, maybe try it out in your projects.

If you aren't already using DALs and code generation to accelerate your development work, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. :)

I've been loving Marc Andreessen's new blog lately. Lots of stuff in there about startups, productivity, etc.

Another DIY SNS .... Nexo.

RWW has a blurb on DIY social networks (Ning, PeopleAggregator, and vibEngine).

An assortment of links to thoughtful blog posts on how to hire IT folks.

Atlassian's Life is a Hire Way

OnStartups' 6 Subtle Signs You Might Have a Winner

SmugMug's How We Hire

Troy Bettinger's Five Tips for Hiring

And once again, Joel Spolsky's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.

And Marc Andreessen's How to Hire the Best People You've Ever Worked With

TIP: You can edit your photos easily online using Pixenate or Snipshot. Snipshot feels a bit more user-friendly, but Pixenate has a few more features. The big plus for me is you don't have to register or anything.

A new version of Fiddler came out recently. From the Fiddler home page:

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

I use Fiddler all the time in my work. I find it invaluable for debugging AJAX requests, performance metrics, file sizes, and more. I've used it to see what web service calls Flash applications make. I like the fact that it works with any web browser. It also supports FiddlerScripts that allow you to impersonate user agents, simulate a dial-up connection, execute performance tests, or modify HTML as it's downloaded.

If you need to debug HTTPS/SSL traffic, or you want to save browsing sessions as Visual Studio WebTest files, you can install Fiddler2. I wish they didn't name Fiddler2 "fiddler 2", because it makes it sound like it's a new version of Fiddler 1.2, when it's not. Fiddler2 is just a fork of Fiddler that's been ported to .NET 2.0 & allows for debugging SSL.

Screenshot of Fiddler Chart

List-y blog post today. Thx to John, Maddog, and other commenters at TechCrunch for some of the links.

• Pluck.com -- Very high end, high startup code ($100k), publishers only.
• Pringo.com -- IMO sounds a bit like Pringles.
• CrowdFactory
• ThePort -- another high-end white label solution
• Group Members International
• YFonGlobal

And then I'll just add a lower-end turnkey, hosted Ning-esque option

• CrowdVine

Update: added Group Members International & YFonGlobal

TechCrunch had a mini-review today about KickApps, a turnkey social networking service/platform that offers widgets, SNS hosting, and an open API.