drafting a barebone social network

Due to the high interest in a barebone social network — read off of the high readers’ number of my post about looking for a barebone social network –, I ponder to implement such a barebone social network in Rails. As determined earlier, the core of it is a single user’s representation on the system plus the representation of their connections to other folks. In other words: a user’s profile (including login and emergency login (such as password re-send mechanism and security question approaches)) and a networking capability — most likely to be implemented as a contact list.

As there’s demand for such a thing at work but I am interested in getting any such barebone social network by and for myself, I’m going to release it under the Lesser GNU Public License, so my boss cannot take it away from me, and anyone else interested in getting your hands dirty and help me erecting this, please join in. You’re welcome.

However, the most core of it I’d like to make work before I ask gna.org or sf.net or whoelse for a place for it to continue to develop on that piece of software. — If you’re eager to learn about what I have any earlier, please let me know. Then I’d speed up putting it online.
 

Asking for implementation details, what does it need? For the single user’s profile? For the buddy list logic? For casual and emergency login, password re-send etc?

For a barebone social network’s user profile, I think, a triple of user nickname, e-mail address and password/hash of password would suffice: Originally, I think, there is really no need for a real name of a social network’s participant. Asking for it might help meeting your business plan’s needs, but technically I don’t see any reason for why you’d ever need to know a user’s real name. Plus, skipping to get after getting that particular bit of personal information releaves you a bit of the otherwise emerging need to care for that data. Ever heard of UK loosing thousands of records of personal data? — You simply don’t want to share that experience nor responsibility nor image damage. Therefore, our stripped-down social network won’t have any such thing as a user’s real name.

Second, what is a contact list? — It is a collection of other [to the database] yet known users of the site. Every single user may have a different collection of such contacts. In terms of an relational database table, I’d imagine that all the contact lists would be entries of that table, featuring on the one hand the user’s ID the particular contact list belongs to and on the other hand a series of user/contact IDs, i.e. a series of table rows, featuring the once user ID and second an ID of a peer of that user; the series in complete make up the user’s whole contact list. However, in terms of Rails, this might look a little different. Which I am about figure out.

To be continued.