Social Bomb - Teach Your Apps to Socialize

Joyent Case Study on Socialbomb

The Challenge

As a social technology company, Socialbomb helps clients deploy highly effective social media apps across multiple platforms and services. No simple task. And social media apps can detonate at any time: when a thoughtful, well-timed fusion of product marketing meets social media sharing, the supporting computer systems can see a shock wave of activity as users log in to get connected. With this volatile mix of multiple platform and service support, on-demand capacity, and total reliability, Socialbomb had to construct a stable computing system that could handle it all.

Scalability

Scalability goes both ways—up and down. When applications or marketing campaigns gain popularity, Socialbomb servers process tremendous network and database activity. And after campaigns run their course, computing requirements may decline as traffic falls off. Planning and scaling a traditional data center for this kind of activity is nearly impossible or at best wasteful. To accommodate the highest level of activity, Socialbomb would have to over-provision a data center to handle the highest peak; when traffic died down, system resources would sit idle.

Platform Flexibility

Moving data between Web sites, phones, Blu-ray players, and onto multiple social media sites requires not just engineering expertise but also an open, feature-rich development platform that’s up to the challenge.

Our good friends at Joyent (our intrepid and ever-friendly hosting company) wrote up a case study on our usage of their services. If you’re curious about how we do things at scale, you should check it out!

Also, don’t miss the Zeus case study on our work with them!

- Mike

Foursquare Hack Day

Foursquare held their first Hackathon/Hack Day on Saturday (the 19th) at General Assembly, and a whole bunch of NYC nerdtrepeneurackers (including half of Team Socialbomb) turned out to tinker. Hell of a day they set up.

Photo by Scott Varland

Team Foursquare worked with the GA folks to set everyone up with an amazing space, and gave us plenty of inspiration, food, and caffeinated beverages. Naveen and the other 4sq tech wizards walked us through some of the new API functionality, best practices, and proper examples, and kept tabs on the folks there to hack things.

Photo by Mike Dory

After the initial meet & greet, teams were formed, and off we went. We, The Socialbombers, set out to make an itinerary-sharing application, which is something we’d been kicking around as an idea for a while (and wish existed for our own use!), and seemed a perfect use for the new API features.

We set out to make an app that would let folks tell their friends about their plans for the night (think about a pub crawl, or someone’s birthday night out). Itinerary-makers would make a list of places and times, and invitees would be able to follow along, see who’d made it to which venue at which time, and check in with their friends as they went. All in all, it was the “be here at this time then this place at this time” app that we’d been looking to find, and it seemed like a fun plan of attack for a hack day.

Photo by Scott Varland

In that one day, we got most of it designed, shelled, and working — it’s probably 90% there, honestly. However, we decided it needed a little more work before a proper demo, which we aim to do soon! It’s another fun Tornado / HTML5Boilerplate kit usage, and it’s been superfun to develop so far.

So, more about that when we get it all together. For now, for further reading, Foursquare posted a writeup of the day, and a list of hacks. Also, they put up a bunch of photos on Flickr, and they’re all pretty amazing!

-Mike

Welcome to the Socialbomb engineering blog!

Hi there world! We here at Socialbomb have been busy at work for the past two years making fun apps, wrangling social networks and their APIs, and writing some all-around excellent code. We’ve had a chance to get in early with some great technologies and frameworks, and wanted to share our experiences with technologies old and new with you here.

Look for upcoming posts talking about our tinkerings with languages, frameworks and databases (buzzword watch: Python, Tornado, PHP, MySQL, Redis, jQuery, AWS), our experience scaling social applications, and how to make a mean Old-Fashioned.

More to follow, and soon!

-Mike