ben sutcliffe

A handful of database tables, several months of development, thousands of lines of code and more bugfixes than I care to mention; I have finally reached the stage where I’m happy to push the new PilatesPlus web site that I’ve been developing out in to the wild.

It’s a huge system, pretty much doing everything except online payments. We invite clients in and store and sort all of their data for use by PilatesPlus staff. Every term the site goes through a rebooking procedure, managing all the queries and turning users input in to a meaningful data representation for staff. The first version is packed full of features I had put on the roadmap for version 2 or beyond, and some of the tools for data manipulation and social media integration are pretty cool.

The site works around my own library of functions and classes. There’s the odd piece of third party software – a very handy open-source GoogleAPI class from Justin Silverton and an adaptation of Abraham Williams’ Twitter OAuth class. Needless to say there’s some Analytics bundled in, with a pretty cool chart for administrators to admire. There’s no WordPress or Drupal, and definitely no Joomla. Everything the site needs has been crafted to work as part of the solution, with no ugly add-ons and plugins.

Best of all, the site’s using the latest technologies and web standards. With the exception of ancient versions of Internet Explorer, the site works the same in every browser, on every computer. All the Flash on the old web site has gone, or where it still lives there’s an almost-as-good HTML alternative underneath. Lovely curvy corners and subtle shadows render beautifully in CSS3 browsers such as Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and it all looks just as beautiful on iPhone.

What’s next? Well, I plan to package up the product as a Pilates/Yoga studio booking system and make it available to people everywhere, as well as developing a handful of new features. As far as I can tell there aren’t any other products that meet this (rather niche) market; but there’s no reason that businesses like these shouldn’t be able to make use of the latest web technologies. Oh, and I’d better start my new refurbishment project too.

Logging in to Google Mail yesterday brought a wave of excitement. Having heard about Google’s new product – Google Buzz – on Twitter, and having seen some of the hype it was getting from the techblogs, I was desperate to try it out.

Bluntly, though, Buzz was a dissapointment. Google have taken Facebook’s status updating functionality, including comments and likes, and added some of Twitter’s best features – such as geotagging. In terms of functionaility, it does nothing more than Twitter and Facebook combined. I had been further excited by being led to believe that Google had integrated Twitter right in. Great, I thought, I can update Twitter straight from my inbox – maybe I can even share links I stumble across?

Unfortunately this is not the case. Twitter integration runs like adding your Twitter Atom feed into Google Reader. Periodically (some time after actually posting) your Tweet shows up in your Buzz timeline. Anything you write in Buzz doesn’t go back to Twitter, in fact Google doesn’t even get you to sign in to Twitter – it just reeds your RSS feed (which won’t work if you keep your profile private, even though Buzz could import your Tweets and post them out using it’s private feature). You can follow people that have Google Mail, but you can’t see the people you follow on Twitter, so Buzz becomes, rather than an aggregator, another service.

The same issues are true for Flickr and YouTube. Add something to Flickr, your Buzz buddies see it. Add media in to a Buzz update, it ain’t going back the way data gets through.

Seriously, how hard would it be to make a single social media site that does … everything? I love the design of the Twitter site, so that’s a definite starting point. Facebook has the best functionality, so that’s got to be there. Flickr is the coolest photo service out there, so you’ve got to be able to see a user’s photostream. The homepage has to be like both Twitter’s and Facebook’s, your friends’/people you follow’s status updates. At the top you should be able to post, anything. A photo should be sent to Flickr, and there should be a way of choosing a set to add it to. Your post should appear in Twitter, and Facebook should get all your media too. The Twitter layout would need the addition of Facebook’s user search bar, and profile pages should have tabs for photos and videos. But the service wouldn’t have to host anything itself – pull statuses out of Twitter, media from everywhere.

Easy…