Future of Social Networking Sites

As you may have noticed, this website has not been updated in a while. This is because all 3 of the writers are busy on some projects — These are Stix and iSociale. Jimmy and Colum have done much work on the iSociale project, but after the Stix project gets going and done, I will be helping out with iSociale by combining the design aspects with the backend system. But here I would like to
write about the Stix social networking application that will be soon released to the public. Here you will find some previews and our goals as a web startup team.

At the very beginning, I was encountered by Todd Oh (long story) from SpotEngine to develop a micro-blogging system. Through a long time of planning, Todd and I have turned a micro-blogging idea into a social networking application. We have also recruited Colum McGaley to help with the design of Stix because of the tremendous work load I have had recently. Here is the staff listing on the SpotEngine website: Stix Staff
The sweet part about this is, we got a nice and short domain name. www.stix.me. Easy to type in on mobile devices and web browsers.
So here is the main idea of Stix — A Facebook-like application that includes geotagged media. This includes blogging, photos, and video. Of course we do not have the server power that Twitter or Facebook have, but we would like to build the next generation of social networking. We have 3 servers to run Stix on, and this still will not be sufficient if we get many users to use Stix. This would mean we would have to acquire more servers later on if Stix gets popular.
Geotagged media would allow you to view where your friends collect media on a map. There will also be “real-time” viewing features as well as advanced filters for viewing (such as photos only, or only from a certain location). Users will be able to see what other users are doing and where they are. Media collected is put in the “Library” in “Books” where other users can view.

Stix Library Book

Our main focus is to keep it as simple as possible and still provide great features within the application. It is similiar to Twitter’s status update system, only with an added field to updates — which is just the location. Read more on the SpotEngine website here. The next thumbnail is a preview of our homepage.

Stix Home

Geographic tagging was very easy to build. The hardest part about this was building the query system to enable users to quickly find media on a map. The search concept is still being sketched up. The next thumbnail is the Flickr geographic search mode integrated into Stix (We will be designing another system). We call it “Stix Wave”.

Stix Wave

Mobile device support is currently in progress and will not be released until after the API is released to the public. We currently have planned several mobile devices to build a Stix application for.
We are currently a Microsoft BizSpark member and Neowiz startup incubation #4 team.
Thanks to Todd, we have also had many people interested in our startup and we were featured on KBS Korea in a new years special.
We plan on releasing very soon, hopefully in June sometime. With this release will be the release of the API for developers to create applications to work with the Stix program.
So check out Stix and keep watching for a release. It is coming soon.
www.stix.me – www.spotengine.net