Social media developer reveals secrets

The world of social networks involves billions of people, and many users are interested in how these social networks emerge. Maybe some secrets make them so unique and successful? Tens of thousands of people would like to answer this question and create their social network.

We will not dwell on ethical issues of social networks hidden from the public. Numerous witnesses and whistleblowers have identified many violations by social media moderators and imperfections in secret algorithms for monitoring harmful content. To analyze the causes of breaches and punish those responsible is regulators' work. So instead, let's focus on technical secrets.

At the beginning of the era of social networks, any project was arousing the great interest of users. The most popular service in the United States, MySpace, was not a model of perfection but had no competitors. Therefore, management felt quite comfortable before the advent of Facebook and was in no hurry to invest in improving the MySpace platform. Everyone knows how such a short-sighted policy ended. Users are tired of intrusive advertising and problems opening pages with multimedia content. Facebook became a refuge in some way, as it offered only text advertising, which did not affect page loading speed. In the fiscal year 2007, MySpace did not seem to have lost a chance yet; their advertising revenues amounted to $800 million compared to Facebook's 300 million. It is difficult to say what more influenced the loss of leadership, the pursuit of advertising revenues from the new MyAds system, or the platform's imperfection. But two years later, MySpace finally lost leadership replaced several owners in the hope of regaining its former influence.

There is no doubt that the painful experience of MySpace made other social networks more attentive to two things. Firstly, the audience has the primary value, as its loss can destroy the entire business. Secondly, the technical improvement of the platform should be a constant process, despite the current success.

Let's start with the value of the audience. There are many reasons why Facebook users express dissatisfaction. However, the interface and interaction methods are generally pretty friendly, and the amount of advertising and its quality does not cause a desire to close the application immediately. By the way, Facebook constantly tests interface changes on small user groups and includes these improvements for everyone when fully confident in their quality. Perhaps, for this reason, the army of users continues to grow from year to year, and the corporation's market cap breaks new records every year regardless of economic crises and pandemic.

Is this helpful knowledge in practice? Partly yes. Unfortunately, none of the current social networks has such a large audience as Facebook, so it is unlikely to choose enough relevant focus groups for testing. But nothing prevents you from developing your internal ethics of relationships with users. The main rule remains immutable - the user's interests are above all else. So now you know how to deal with the assembled audience correctly. And how to find and collect it?

The potential of a social network depends on the number of users, and at first glance, the Facebook model is attractive to repeat. But this is a common misconception of those who have not studied this company's business model. Think about why this dominant social network is free for users. Advertisers find it attractive enough to achieve their own business goals. The effectiveness of advertising is achieved, in turn, by the ability to target it based on the collected user data. It turns out to be a vicious circle of "Many users-Many data-Many advertisers-Large profit-Good service-Many users." You must admit that a new social network has no chance to enter this circle at no point.

But not everything is hopeless. Fortunately, Facebook's closed system of creating and retaining audiences effectively deter the company itself from experimenting. Therefore, all other social networks have complete freedom to develop new interaction methods with users. Taking advantage of the chances depends on the creative potential of the creators of the new social network. Of course, the decision on how to interact with the user depends entirely on why the user should interact with the new social network.

That's the first and most important secret of a social network. Finding the user's needs is the most challenging task. It seems that global players occupy all niches, and there is no free space in the market for the new social network. But every year, we witness the rise of another social network startup, and every time we wonder why they didn't invent it before. The bright star of 2020 was the Clubhouse application, which offered a relatively simple function of voice chat rooms. The application provides nothing else, but limited access to the platform has caused a stirring demand among users.

A unique idea is not the only way to stand out from competitors. You can try to exploit someone else's view in a new segment. For example, the well-known marketplace and social network Etsy immediately chose a narrow sphere of interest - vintage, author’s, and rare items. It turned out that they successfully collected its unique audience without copying the eBay online hypermarket model. Pay attention to how Etsy monetizes their service - despite the large audience (tens of millions of users), Etsy does not sell targeted advertising like Facebook. Instead, the usual small commission charged to sellers allows the company to earn millions of dollars.

Another example is specialized dating sites for professionals. Unlike universal dating sites like Tinder, professional dating sites offer services for single business people who do not have time for long-term relationship building. Highlighting such a narrow but solvent segment from the entire audience of single people allows these services to maintain a sustainable business model.

Summing up the first results, we can confidently say that the main secret of the social network is to find the needs of the audience. Only the startup founders can find it based on the market situation and personal preferences. Once you have identified this need, you can move on to the next secret, namely, choosing a social network platform.

When Mark Zuckerberg was creating Facebook, there was no such wide range of tools for creating social networks as it is now. So he had to develop all the tools from scratch and be a pioneer in completing all the functions, without which any social network application is inconceivable today.

Facebook's success caused the desire to create social networks and the tools for developing them.

In 2000s, social media sites looked like regular websites. And although the creation of social networks has already become a trend, the tools for their deployment were still unique. Therefore, the desire to use open-source engines to create social networks has become natural. That's how a BuddyPress add-in appeared in 2009, which added social interaction capabilities for the popular WordPress web engine. But even 13 years later, this popular add-on could not become a full-fledged solution for creating a social network. The BuddyPress developers themselves reasonably point to the applicability of the product: A campus-wide social network for your university, school, or college, an internal communication tool for your company, a niche social network for your interest topic, a focused social network for your new product. Agree, such ambitions won’t allow you to conquer the world. There are several other reasons why such solutions are in little demand.

Conventional websites are star-type client-server systems. A server that simultaneously processes similar requests from all available users is at the center of such a system. This structure makes it a significant opportunity to cache identical user requests to centralized stored information on the server and not overload the system core. Such a system with enough fast cache can serve tens of thousands of users without a noticeable decrease in performance.

Social media websites have a much more complex topology. All users create content to be delivered to the server, processed, and distributed to millions of users. Conventional caching no longer helps in such conditions, as the transmitted data is heterogeneous and unique. Moreover, such a data flow is so large that the time to live in the cache is negligible.

Thus, a regular web engine cannot serve as a large or medium-sized social network.

The second big problem of such engines is data security. The source code is open and is constantly modified by a large developer community worldwide. Code changes are required not only to add new features but also to correct vulnerabilities found. You can be sure that where there are vulnerabilities, there are always hackers. Some attackers use them to gain experience and not harm the attacked systems. But others are implementing exploits with the expectation of using compromised web resources for long-term purposes. It can be blackmailing owners or using cracked resources as bots for distributed attacks on other websites. Perhaps the worst can be the theft of users' data from such weakly protected websites.

And the last problem is that all available third-party plugins and modules implement standard social interaction functions. Creating a new feature requires the work of developers, which can be expensive. But you will need constant support to ensure its compatibility with the constantly updated web engine. Sometimes major updates of the web engine make third-party add-ons completely inoperable. As a result, open-source solutions lose their main advantage - the low cost of creating a unique project.

Now you understand why nobody uses popular open-source website engines to build social networks.

Software developers saw the popularity of social media creation services and the inability to use open-source to meet demand. Therefore, they offered a different approach - the use of SaaS platforms. SaaS (Software as a Service) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet - as a service. Instead of installing and maintaining software, you access it via the Internet, freeing yourself from complex software and hardware management. SaaS applications are sometimes called Web-based software, on-demand software, or hosted software.

At first glance, everything looks great. The provider undertakes all software installation, updating, hardware maintenance, and security issues. The customer is free from a headache to monitor the status of his website and can entirely focus on the audience of his project. The cost of maintenance on such a platform rarely exceeds several thousand dollars per year, which makes it almost an ideal choice. But is this a panacea for all the problems? Unfortunately, this is not the case. SaaS platforms solved many issues of open-source platforms but added other unsolvable ones.

The first and foremost problem is the unification of services on SaaS platforms. Providers cannot consider all the wishes of customers, so it is simply impossible to create on the SaaS platform, for example, the similarity of Snapchat. Moreover, it is impossible to create a new unique function. You will also have to use standard user interfaces, not contributing to audience loyalty.

The second significant problem is that all content created by users will belong to the provider, not the social network owner. Thus, the website owner becomes a hostage of such a service. The more users generate unique content on such a platform, the more user data is in the hands of the provider. Then the natural question arises: a provider or a customer is the actual social network owner on the SaaS platform? And how are customers different from Facebook group administrators?

The third question to SaaS platforms is rather theoretical. Since all websites use shared resources (making such a platform inexpensive), no one assumes allocated resources for your project. Therefore, you can only guess what difficulties social media users will face on these platforms when reaching an audience of more than tens of thousands of users.

Thus, the social network on the SaaS platform is a very inexpensive and beautiful toy. However, such a social network will never claim recognition and commercial success.

What to choose if open-source and SaaS platforms have so many restrictions? If you have a budget of several hundred thousand dollars, you can try to create a platform from scratch, as all well-known social networks do. But then, you need to accept the risks of this approach. The first risk is the time of platform development. Regardless of the experience of developers, the process will take a long time, perhaps several years. No one will undertake to predict what can happen during this time. Either the idea of a social network will have time to burn out, or it will be implemented in a similar form by another startup. Nobody can exclude the risk of overspending the project budget.

If everything goes well, your chances of getting a thriving social network will increase significantly. But if something goes wrong, you will have an unfinished project in your hands with weak prospects for finding new investors. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to minimize these risks without compromising the project.

The best solution is to use the QSNE (Qwerty Social Network Engine) platform from X Networks. The QSNE is a framework, social media deployment tools, and ready-made infrastructure for high-load projects. Notably, the QSNE is not a constructor for the self-assembly of a finished project but a set of solutions based on the stack of modern technologies. The X Networks use it to create high-load social networks, web portals, and marketplaces. As a result, the customer gets the opportunity to use the same technologies as well-known social networks own.

The advantage of using the QSNE is that the customer receives the finished project within a predicted time for a fixed price and excludes the risks of delay in the development and over-expenditure of the budget.

The question may arise, if the QSNE is a holistic platform, does this mean that it is impossible to deploy a social network on the customer's infrastructure? No way, a ready social network is a customer-owned product and can therefore be deployed in any suitable infrastructure. X Networks engineers can prepare and configure the proper customer's infrastructure and prepare specialists to maintain it.

Despite the unique capabilities of the QSNE platform, the cost of developing a social network is moderate. It is many times lower than the cost of creating a platform from scratch and not much higher than the cost of refining open-source solutions. If you have a brilliant idea and an insufficient budget, use the offer to co-finance your project.

So we have discovered two main secrets of creating a successful social network - a promising idea and a productive platform for its implementation. The first issue is solved by the customer independently. The second question's answer is in the hands of the company X Networks, which has twenty years of experience in creating complex projects, including social networks.