How hard is Facebook to code?

[Skaught]

I am in the process of starting to organize my business plan for an online social media Venture. Does anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to build a site similar to facebook?

How many programmers would be needed and how long would it take? I plan on starting the social network in one city, and once it takes off, it can expand to other cities.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[james.wired]

Not sure if it's the coding part that is difficult. I think you need to fill your basket with marketing and creativity more..

 

[Skaught]

Thanks james. Me and my business partner want to focus more on the marketing aspect of the business anyways since that is our strength. We have knowledge of web design and Java, but it isn't particularly our strong point. We'd like to get a couple programmers on board with our mission.

Would we be able to make a facebook page relatively easy? Maybe add a feedback and rating system like eBay mixed in... Just looking for a ballpark idea of what it would involve here...

 

[El_Roberto]

With a couple of decent programmers you should have the site up and running within a month or two. I have no experience in the industry however me and a mate had to do something similar for a final project in one of our university papers. It took us 4 days of continuos coding in the labs to get it all set up and working (We didn't have time to debug properly or put in anywhere near the features FB/Ebay have, hence why i suggest a month or two). Good luck!

Robert.

 

[Baez]

The size Facebook is now, with a team of two developers it would take about 25 years. When it originally released, about 6 months.

Social Media is NOT the way to go now. The market is so over saturated you'll never get anywhere. I suggest you find another area of the web to put your skills to use.

 

[patonb]

isn't facebook really more than a webpage, css & php, and a whole lot of database and srver storage?

 

[Baez]

Most websites are more than just code. vBulletin has close to 200 tables in its database and stores every single piece of information you see here in it.

 

[Kharn]

The size Facebook is now, with a team of two developers it would take about 25 years. When it originally released, about 6 months.

Social Media is NOT the way to go now. The market is so over saturated you'll never get anywhere. I suggest you find another area of the web to put your skills to use.

Just to add to the market saturation point above, Social networking really become popular with investors because it was supposed to be the dotcom bubble that would never burst because it would provide so much useful data for marketing campaigns (demographic research is hard to gather) thus leading to a nice regular cash flow, this never materialized this has ended up as egg on the face for lot's of investment bankers who poured money into it (lot's of planned IPO's never happend) and let's not forget that the public is fickle.

I am going to use facebook as a example - Facebook is currently one of the top domains on the internet, but when all the negative press came out they dropped a few places, now that might not seem much but considering that they currently have a PR of 10 on the google index any minor drop will hurt them what sites like this relly on is traffic constant and regular numbers of visitors with semi-acceptable low periods around public holidays only being a minor blip in the traffic.

But let's get hypothetical here, say Facebook managed to annoy Rupert Murdoc he has more than enough media clout to make them drop users to a extent they they would not recover, also a lot of companies are starting to see the FB factor effect work levels. I read a study on a small office where at first facebook was not actively blocked then the sysadmin blocked the domain productivity increased by 5% on the first day alone.

I would aim my sights towards looking for the next big thing, I have no idea what that is but I would take a good guess that it will be IPTV a full blown TV station on the internet as people want content on demand and not scheduled programming.

 

[james.wired]

I would put money on the IPTV also. I want a Hulu variation that isn't limited to only the USA PLEASE.

 

[Kharn]

The problem that needs to be addressed is marketing, the adverts on Hulu are target for the US market it isn't that hard to dectect where some one is comming from and then load that set of adverts.
A fantastic example of how to do IP TV is Hak5, they mostly use adverts for revenue but try and get as many of them that are relevant to the international market.

A secondary issue is that of Piracy, how long before a flash vid is copied and then posted to a torrent site some of the BIG commercial companies want to jump over to IPTV as it would reduce operational costs but wont as they want to keep there shows under there full control.