Highlights

• Early use of Ajax
• First social app I worked with.
• First professional rails app I worked on.

Collectview

Collectview was designed to allow collectors to upload and show off their collections. It had some pretty cool features at the time for both uploading the pictures and sharing them driven mainly by Ajax. Collectview was the first social app I worked on and I learned an important maxim when it comes to building social apps: At this stage of the game if you are planning on launching a social app you ideally want to have an already existing population of users to launch to. Barring that you need to have a well thought out plan for gaining users. This seems to be a recurring problem that creeps up on social network apps. With Collectview, we finished the app and had no idea how to launch it.

Works

• City Winery
• Gist
• Divvy
• Ringjacker
• USA Wireless
• Collectview

Designing for the Social Web.

Building a successful social network app is much harder than it looks. The biggest mistake I've noticed is the tendency to focus more on the technical aspects of creating the website rather than the organic aspects of building something that attracts attention. At this point in the game if you don't have a population of users to launch to, or you do not have a plan for launching, I would recommend working on this before you start the build process. Josh Bokardo spends a lot of time discussing these issues and his book "Designing for the Social Web" is worth reading.