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Book Description
Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site
Product Description
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.
- Determine who will be drawn to your site, why they'll stay, and who they'll interact with
- Create visual design that clearly communicates how your site works
- Build the software you need versus plugging in one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf apps
- Manage the identities of your visitors and determine how to support their interaction
- Monitor demand from the community to guide your choice of new functions
- Plan the launch of your site and get the message out
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unusual and useful compromise,
By
This review is from: Building Social Web Applications (Paperback)
I doubt that I am typical of readers of this book, coming to it as an over-60 marketing specialist but it is in this contect that I was very pleased with it. Unusually for "techy" books this not only makes a nod towards marketing but is essentially a marketing book by another name. Its focus is on what users may value. It virtually ignores the word "marketing" in doing so, which is exactly how business should be - market orientation without pieon-holing. It is really valuable to view new media in the context of real people behaviour as Gavin Bell does. It is relatively jargon free too, which helps the layman. The second plus is the focus on simplicity - launch something which meets the original concept need without adding all of the complexity which the idea could lead to. Too many projects in all spheres fall foul of trying to achieve perfection before release, ending up with over-costly and confused platforms which are harder to communicate to the original target users. I found the structure rather bitty and repetitive but all in all a valuable contribution to the armoury of the marketeer and developer needing to understand how to think about engagement in social networks.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More evolving than building really...,
By
This review is from: Building Social Web Applications (Paperback)
Building Social Web Applications (written by Gavin Bell for O'Reilly press) is a tough book top review for the simple reason that it's a pretty tough book to classify! From a programmers point of view one thing it really won't tell you how to do it to build web applications of any type, social or not. Equally it's not really about planning an social web application from the ground up with all the fiddly information architecture and so on that involves. Really it sits in the unholy middle ground and is much more concerned with marketing and sociology than the technical manual you might be expecting. It has some nice coverage of build principles (build small and expand, develop APIs so people can hook into your site etc.) and most of these principles will have a handful of references to papers or sites that will tell you more. To be honest though I found this approach rather frustrating. It may work well on a website where the information is merely a hyperlink away but coming across some long, user unfriendly URL in the middle of a paragraph really is just grating. How useful the book is to you will really depend on what you are doing. If you're at the start of the road with just a germ of an idea then it's not likely to be much use to you as anything more than some developmental pointers for later down the road where you will really be wanting information and technical architecture. In fact you may find the claim of (roughly) ideas are easy technology is hard makes you want to throw the book out of the window! Equally if you are after a technical manual to cover how to build applications then you will be disappointed. If however you have started to develop an idea and want to know where to take it, the principles to employ to ensure your application is scalable and approaches to take to market your application and engage your audience then it could be an absolute gem.
In summary if you want some general developmental pointers at the start of a social media project it's a good book. If you have a social media project or application you want to scale and expand while still keeping it coherent and social it's a great book. If however you want to code up a specced up application then it's pretty much a door stop.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.4 out of 5 stars (14 customer reviews) 11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The advice you can get from this book is platform agnostic,
By Foti Massimo - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Social Web Applications (Paperback)
If you are looking for and how-to guide, with code listings and practical examples you better pick another book. Gavin Bell covers the topic from an architect/designer point of view, he also tends keep in mind the business side of things, something I appreciated. This means the content will be valuable for a long time, since languages, tools and frameworks come and go, while the advice you can get from this book is platform agnostic. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a book with just dry theory, it's based on solid experience both from first-hand experience by the author and the way some major social applications have been build and evolved
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential guide to fostering online community,
By Christian Crumlish "mediajunkie" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Social Web Applications (Paperback)
Gavin Bell draws on his extensive experience to offer a well structured guide to adding community elements to a website or application. His book will help any professional planning a social strategy, designing a set of social features, determining the types of relationships to foster among users, and even determining how best to manage change in an existing site or online structure.
Bell covers a wide gamut of issues that a site planner will need to consider, from developing the data schema for people, relationships, and objects; to how best to expose APIs to third-party developers; to the process of rolling out a new product or feature. Anyone developing a social website or app should keep this book handy throughout the process. Bell and I share a publisher and our titles cover some similar issues. When I first picked up Bell's finished book I gritted my teeth with envy. As I quickly devoured the book, though, I was relieved (or, at least I convinced myself) that our books are complementary and are each useful in their own way. If you're looking for one book to guide you through the entire process, from conception to launch and into the life of a social web application, then this is the book for you. 9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
great ideas but very repetitive,
By real world experience "curedtrader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Building Social Web Applications (Paperback)
This book is rich in important ideas and is definitely a must read for those interested in the social web. Unfortunately I suspect that it was either written in haste or (perhaps more likely) the author was still working out his ideas as he wrote it, because it is extremely repetitive. This constant reiteration does make the reading experience rather more hard work than it should be because the underlying material is strong and valuable. I am entirely confident that in the next addition he can easily take out 100 pages and the book will be the stronger for it. This is Gavin's first book and I don't think he was well served by his publisher. A competent editor could and should have pointed out the large areas of duplication. Nonetheless, and to repeat myself :), it is a must read.
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