When looking at the development of a social networking site, there are a number of fundamentals that I think need to be implemented before you can consider that you have the basic framework for a social network.

Basic Information
The absolute basic building block of such a site is the user account, or user object. The question then becomes, what do we need to store about this user? The actual requirements will vary between types of social network, but for my purposes I’m storing a small subset of common user data:

• username
• password
• nickname
• gender
• msisdn
• birth date
• address details

I’m recording the MSISDN since this will also be a mobile social network, and if we want to deliver services to the user via their phone, we need to know the number. This is also going to be the route we use for registration (text to a number to register) so we have some form of user verification.

This list is the basic information we need, but we also need some specific information that we’ll use internally, some of which the user will be able to change, some which we’ll use for identification purposes. So to this basic list I’ve added the following as well:

• registration date
• last visit
• is adult
• registered

We’ll use the two dates for some stuff as we go along (such as presence), and for redundancy (and because reading a field is quicker than calculating a date - here’s some thinking ahead going into the design), we’ll set a flag at registration time related to the user’s age. The last field, registered is a tracking field which is set to ‘true’ once registration is complete, since a user record is created for a new user as soon as they begin the registration process, not when they finish it.

Basics of Personalisation
Everyone likes to personalise their social networking accounts, but not all personalised information is always needed on every displayed page. Since we’re building up a basic user object that we’ll load for the user every time they visit, we only need some small additional information (initially at least), so we’ll add a couple of extra fields to the basic user object:

• avatar
• about me

Avatar is, as you would expect, related to a user’s picture. We’ll talk about how we deal with this information later, as there’s much more to a user avatar than just storing a picture. After all, if you have 25,000,000 users, where do you store all the pictures? You certainly don’t want every user to have their avatar stored as a blob field in the database…

The about me field is a little throwaway item I’ve put in as a quick way of letting peopel write a little about themselves, which is automatically displayed on their account. This and the avatar field are user changeable (as is the password, of course!).

The User Object
Now that we’ve determined a basic set of fields with information about a user, we can start setting up the database tables, and the underlying back-end code for loading, updating and using this object to deliver the social network itself. The manipulation of this object will be the subject of a later post.