Technical solutions for social networks creation

Modern technology helps us in all areas of our lives. As they improve, they become increasingly invisible to users. Social networks have become an everyday necessity, and when even a small failure of services occurs, we immediately begin to look for its cause. What technical solutions are used to create social networks, and how does this affect their sustainability?

To understand how modern social networks appeared, you need to go back to the last century and trace the path that communication technologies and software have passed. Scientists accumulated experience gradually and then transformed it into practical solutions.

The first step was the emergence of the TCP/IP in 1973. This protocol opened the theoretical possibility of exchanging data packets between computers in switched data networks. And from that moment on, the term Internet began to be used.

It took a long time before 1991 it was possible to create the first Internet browser for displaying hypertext documents. This revolution made the visual interface of human interaction with the computer intuitive. This achievement has significantly expanded the range of Internet users. Engineers and scientists were joined by people far from technical specialties.

The process of involving new users on the Internet began to gain such speed that the prototypes of the first social networks appeared a few years later. The currently forgotten Six Degrees project (1997) was entertaining and, for the first time, proposed a model of social circles as a new way to interact with users on the Internet. Six Degrees attracted 3.5 million users at the peak of popularity but eventually gave way to other players.

Social circles have become a vector of movement for new social networks, and increased data networks bandwidth has made it possible to add new types of content to text messages. Born in 2003, MySpace confidently broke into the lead, offering users opportunities to share music and photos.

We can't say that this takeoff was easy. It became apparent that audience expansion and retention are the most important and complex tasks. Therefore, one of the founders of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe, in 2005 tried to agree with Mark Zuckerberg to take over the then not yet very popular Facebook for $75 million. Who knows, maybe Myspace would dominate now if the deal took place.

Interestingly, MySpace itself fell under the onslaught of Facebook because of excessive self-confidence in its exclusivity. At that time, Facebook could not offer any unique features; it simply eliminated the main shortcomings of the competitor - the lagging interface and the ad dominance.

With the advent of Facebook, the landscape of social networks has changed. The painful experience of its predecessors forced Facebook to pay special attention to the needs and preferences of the audience. The result was the continuous growth of the company for 18 years. Finally, today it isn't easy to imagine another company that dares to challenge Facebook. And the main reason is the inability to collect audience size comparable to Facebook.

Whatever topic you remember, it will pop up on Facebook. We agree that it will often be a superficial view of ordinary users on the question asked. But the social network itself does not seek to be an authoritative source on all issues (suffice it to recall the recent scandals about internal moderation mechanisms).

If Facebook competitors have no chance to fight for a broad audience, maybe try to segment it and deepen their specialization? Yes, this approach works! You will find a lot of confirmation of this if you look at any successful modern social media project.

Choosing a social network niche is the most challenging question, but no one can answer it better than the founder himself. However, the technical side of the issue is not so diverse, so we can outline all the possibilities in a short article.

Let's look at modern cars. They all have mandatory parts - wheels, steering, engine, brake system, etc. The technical success of the vehicle as a whole will depend on how well the engineers have worked out each subsystem. The association with creating a good car is suitable for social networks. Everyone roughly understands what to expect from a well-made finished product, but few people know how to make it in practice.

Like the first cars, the first social networks were created by enthusiasts with the help of improvised tools. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was no special software for building social networks, so founders did everything in common programming languages through trial and error. This approach required a lot of effort, but until 2000, the creators had time for experiments, as only 1-2 competitors appeared every year. However, after 2003, 5-7 new social networks began to start annually, and the cost of error in case of delay or unsuccessful development has increased significantly. Traditional programming languages in such conditions have become inflexible enough and, in general, have lost their exceptional importance.

Entire frameworks have been designed to facilitate the construction of complex computing systems (and social networks are also such). Software frameworks are similar to scaffolding to create unique buildings, and almost all modern popular social networks use them as primary tools.

From a business point of view, development on the framework is almost always more cost-effective and better than writing a project in a pure programming language without using any platforms. Development without using a framework can be the right solution only in two cases - either the project is simple and does not require further development or requires very low-level optimization. In all other cases, development on the software platform is faster and better.

The social network created with the help of the framework is similar to the roller coaster attraction. From the outside, it seems that this structure is hazardous, but in fact, each rise and turn is calculated with filigree accuracy, so accidents are excluded. Of course, frameworks allow you to create completely different social networking projects with unique concepts.

The second category of technical solutions for creating social networks is Content Management Systems (CMS). They gained immense popularity during the explosive growth in the number of websites in 2000, but they are rarely used as social media platforms.

There are two types of CMS - boxed (ready-made software product to download or purchase) and proprietary. Proprietary systems are mostly replicated off-the-shelf projects, inflexible and undocumented. As a result, they are utterly unsuitable for creating a product with new functionality, such as social networks.

Boxed CMS is usually distributed as open-source products with good documentation and support from the community. Therefore, creating websites with functionality embedded in these CMS is pretty quick and straightforward. At the same time, the development of simple solutions often does not even require the participation of a programmer in the project.

Content Management System out of the box provides many end-user processes and features required to manage the site. For example, within the pre-installed functionality, the website on CMS can already edit pages and manage their structure, manage system users and their access level, sort and filter various objects, and much more.

Support for CMS sites is more manageable than working with systems written from scratch; this is facilitated by both the availability of documentation and the high professional level of CMS developers, which is reflected in the logical and understandable architecture of the system.

But all CMS advantages are outweighed by shortcomings, which are in abundance, and some of the restrictions are insurmountable. For example, implementing non-standard functionality or fine-tuning for your business processes is complicated. In addition, the embedded system processes are usually closely related, so modifying one lead to altering another one. In some cases, implementing specific functionality within the CMS is impossible at all.

The downside of CMS versatility is the redundancy of functionality, the accompanying increase in the complexity of management and use, and performance problems. For example, the CMS website performs guaranteed more data operations than the process requires, and the data storage structure is usually much larger than the project's actual needs.

Developing a social network website on CMS is theoretically possible but practically meaningless. If the framework allows you to create an exciting roller coaster for users, then with the help of CMS, it will be possible to make only a wooden rocking horse. It is unlikely that it will be possible to find a sufficient number of users who will be so unpretentious in the modern world.

The third class of platforms that have become widespread is SaaS solutions, a software rental service. The main driver of sales of SaaS solutions is the idea that it is no longer necessary to buy and deploy CMS and order individual development. Instead, it is enough to configure the site issued by the supplier for your tasks and regularly pay a subscription fee. Therefore, creating a website using SaaS solutions is quite realistic.

SaaS solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, so not every project can be implemented in this way. Nevertheless, SaaS is great for launching projects to test business hypotheses in practice (for example, AB testing), simple projects, and landing pages.

If we talk about the applicability of SaaS solutions for creating social networks, this is impossible. Historically, they have appeared to meet the growing interest of users in simple designers to create simple sites that are not particularly demanding on design and functions and will not require any improvements to software logic. However, with the growing popularity of social networks, SaaS platforms have received some features that successfully copy the big brothers.

Unfortunately, many problems exist behind SaaS platforms' ease of use and external attractiveness. For example, sites on SaaS platforms use ready-made templates, which can only be colored and swapped individual blocks. The rigid SaaS functionality is part of the strategy - safety and simplicity for all at the expense of uniqueness for units. And if the platform is unable to do something, there is no way to fix it. Therefore, specific tasks and flexible settings are not about SaaS.

And the most important feature of websites on such platforms is low performance, fault tolerance, and performance. As a rule, these indicators are similar to virtual hosting sites running on an unoptimized boxed CMS.

The allegory of the social network website on the SaaS platform is a kid's clockwork car. Of course, it can be an adult toy for an hour, but it makes no sense to consider the advantages of SaaS platforms with such disadvantages.

So, having considered four technical solutions for creating a social network, we found out that for a complex high-load project with complex business logic and high speed, reliability, and security requirements, the only proper solution is development on frameworks. But like any other approach, it has drawbacks.

The development terms of standard functionality on frameworks are much longer than when using CMS. This is because frameworks contain only the essential application-level logic components, so many functions need to be implemented individually.

Development on the framework requires a deep understanding of the business processes. For example, to create a social network, it is necessary to accurately understand the dependencies of various functions to prevent chaos in the users' networking.

You can overcome all these shortcomings in creating a project on the framework from scratch if the developer has good experience and qualifications and the project budget is designed to support the development team for several years. But time is fleeting, and the social media market is very dynamic. Therefore, there is a significant risk of getting the finished product too late.

To significantly reduce development time and eliminate risks is real if you rely on a developer who already has a specially designed framework with implemented social media functions. The X Networks company has such an offer. Own platform for creating and deploying social networks QSNE (Qwerty Social Network Engine) allows you to implement a project of any complexity, not just a social network.

The main work of the company's engineers is to assemble the project based on a specialized framework. All functions of users' social interaction are already available for inclusion, so the development issues from scratch and testing are irrelevant. This considerably saves the company's resources and, therefore, the customer's money and time. Here is a list of functions vital for a social network that claims to be recognized by users.

- Built-in support for 40+ world languages and correction tools for translators allow automatic user language detection with the possibility of subsequent customization, translations of publications and user comments, and other content into readers' languages;

- The built-in billing system operates hundreds of different currencies (virtual and national), cross-rates calculation, taking into account exchange processing centers and the rates of various central banks, provides the functionality of the payment system;

- Qwerty Network File Cloud can store and configure file access for users. It provides capabilities similar to Google Drive and exchange files attach files to publications or other objects. This ability is critical because social networks and complex portals generate a lot of content;

- Billing and payment control systems integrated with notification services;

- Qwerty Artificial intelligence has flexible capabilities to organize technical user support and intelligent publications ranking;

- News aggregation from authoritative sources (for each project, we define a list of "authorities");

- Possibilities of a marketplace, automation of sales and logistics, as well as internal transaction arbitration - we can develop your project into an analog of AliExpress;

- Smart contracts, «safe transactions, » internal arbitration service;

- Reliable internal mail server provides messaging and mailing automation that checks for correct addresses, as well as overflow of mailboxes;

- Protection systems against DDOS and other types of attacks with automatic notification of providers (X Networks also owns the testddos.com service to check the websites' load testing);

- Modules for interacting with SMS and phone services;

- Protecting accounts from hacking, logging permissions, and two-factor authentication. The QSNE security system is one of the critical blocks of the platform;

- Subscriptions to users and communities;

- Aggressive data caching (similar to Facebook);

- Flexible privacy settings for users and their publications;

- Powerful multi-threaded search engine;

- Creation of communities (open and closed pages, as well as professional and "by subscription");

- Internal messenger (instant messaging system), integrated with standalone QAIM messenger, with the capabilities of artificial intelligence;

- Anti-virus check of published content (SDK over 20 anti-viruses), intelligent pre-moderation;

- End-to-end tagging of any content and data in the flow of information;

- Shortening link service system;

- Protection against bots and parsing (verification of user actions);

- SMM tools;

This toolset is enough to create any robust social network, and you may find a similar list from other developers. So it will be helpful to clarify the objective performance parameters of such a platform. For example, X Networks regularly tests its QSNE platform and publishes results.

Thus, the load testing carried out in 2020 confirmed the ability of the platform to withstand 4 Gbps (and up to 10 Gbps!). This means ensuring continuity of service provision in case of many user requests and under an external DDoS attack. At the same time, the security subsystem automatically identifies 98% of attack sources and sends notifications to relevant providers.

In 2021, the company tested the database speed on the QSNE platform. Their know-how made it possible to equalize the performance of the MySQL database with well-known NoSQL databases. At the same time, testing on Google PageSpeed Insights showed the highest score of access speed - 100 points!

A technical solution will determine users' impressions in many ways. Should their emotions be comparable to riding a roller coaster or a rocking horse? Or maybe it's enough to offer them a clockwork toy car?

It's up to you what to choose to create a social network. However, if your goals are ambitious, rely on a proven solution on the QSNE platform, especially since X Networks is not limited to providing only web development services and is open to various forms of cooperation.