MyFriendSuggests.com
March 19, 2007 – 6:55 pmMyFriendSuggests.com is our first true web application that we have deployed for public use. We haven’t really begun any official promotion other than some word of mouth emails. Basically the site is a social networking site for people to recommend restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, local services, etc. to each other. What’s unique is that as you add friends we create a friend network which is sort of like 6 degree of Kevin Bacon. Using that network, and information about the places you suggest we find suggestions for you using a custom algorithm. Once we have enough users with large enough networks we think we can accurately predict restaurants and bars that you will like in your local area as well as when you travel to new areas. We also have some nice features like a personalized newsletter that tells you about new suggestions in your favorite areas and sends you some personalizes suggestions of places you might like. If your interested feel free to check it out.
Since this is a developement blog lets get back to development, let me give you the run down on the site. Basically the site is written as a mixture of JSPs and Servlets all handcoded in Eclipse. We did not implement a Java Web Framework as I became frustrated with most of them and decided to try to roll my own. Having done that I am starting to understand some of the pain points of separation of code/display/persistence that these frameworks try to solve. I haven’t had a chance to actually try any out to see which would be the best for me. The site has a mySQL database behind it. This post is just an overview of things and I will be posting some more specific stuff in the next few days.
