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I would honestly never rely solely on one system, unless that system was my own. You never know what might happen in a years time. Everyone might realise that F
by chrislomax 16y ago
I would honestly never rely solely on one system, unless that system was my own. You never know what might happen in a years time. Everyone might realise that Facebook is actually worth £10 and it just drops out the sky altogehter.
One of the developers here was building a newsletter system recently and they wanted to use just one 3rd party mail system to manage the user lists and groups etc. I stressed that we must make the system independent and to store the lists of users and groups ourselves and only replicate to the email marketing system. That way, if we ever fell out with the email marketing software we could just open a relationship with another company and replicate the same information there.
As a company, we never implement something without sitting down and talking about the pro's and con's first. Don't get me wrong, we don't have meetings for the sake of meetings but important matters we take the time to discuss.
When we planned our CMS, we took 2 weeks to plan the system and how it would work. We are 18 months into the development cycle and the only thing we can think of that we would do differently is to use url routing over our own url engine. It's not even a massive change to implemement so we are lucky. The 2 weeks planning has saved months of re-factoring for future.
We now have news, galleries, ecommerce, content driven pages, personalised url campaigns, newsletters, e-newsletters. The list goes on. All with no regrets!
It's unfortunate that a company has to suffer bad planning and bad decisions, the main thing is learning from them
- bbd37 16y agoWe knew well the risks going in, but still sucks when you run into the worst-case scenario. It certainly moved forwards our plans to get in alternatives.
- chrislomax 16y agoWhat was the developement time on the app compared to if you had implemented a full system with photo upload etc? Was time a factor?
- bbd37 16y agoSure, it was a factor. The whole backend was built in 3 months, photo upload would have added another few weeks. But again, we aimed not to do that at all, wanted to be more virtual. At least until we heard form enough users that they wanted that option.
- chrislomax 16y agoIt's good you managed to find out what the issue with Facebook was and that they allowed the re-submitted application. I not had the chance to work with any of the social networks or app stores yet. I am currently in the process of being commissioned to do an Android app, I'm a little concerned myself about running into red tape.
- rmc 16y agoYou have to trust someone. Unless you're using multiple datacentres, you are trusting your datacentre/hosting provider. All it takes is one billing dispute before they turn you off. Re: mailing list, the great thing about email (unlike facebook), is you can change how you send you emails and your end user can still get your emails, and they don't know you've changed. Whereas with Facebook, you can't just change to (say) Diaspora without affecting your users.
- chrislomax 16y agoI appreciate what you are saying but I know that if I pay my bills and I handle my own redundancy I am only responsible for myself. The level of dependency you are referring to would get you stuck in a recursive loop of never trusting anyone! What I am saying is, if this company had stored the pics on their own server then they could still retrieve the pictures. You would then push the pictures to Facebook, Diaspora, Twitter etc. The company were using the data storing capabilities in Facebook to store the pictures, hence the high dependency on Facebook. If in the instance I mentioned, Facebook cancel the app, you would still have the pics on your server and the user could see them and post them elsewhere