A few weeks ago I was quoted in a New Media Age article about Ruby On Rails and the London agency market (available online for subscribers) and it’s worth following up a few things, especially on Made By Many’s involvement with Rails.

At Made By Many we like to remain technology agnostic, which is why we don’t have a large team of developers. We feel this benefits us and our clients more by not overly invested in one thing that limits our creative output and may not be the best solution for our clients. This enables us to consult on the whole range of technology strategies and lets us play with best technologies around.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have some favorites, and those are delivering massive benefits for our clients and fit with the creative work and processes we adopt. Is this regard Ruby On Rails has been a fantastic choice for some of the projects we have been working on, and it’s for the same reasons that Alex MacCaw and I have been so involved with it for the past few years.

The creative solutions we architect and design are geared towards delivering bespoke functionality, exciter/delighter features and unique social propositions. This, combined with a strategy to release early and iterate, means we need development speed and a flexible framework. Working with Rails has given that and we have used it ourselves on a number of smaller projects as well as working with partners on three big new social media sites.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy but we have been working with some real experts in New Bamboo and combining agile design and agile development approaches. The on-going issue with Rails is around effective and scalable deployment, Ruby itself it not as fast as other languages and Rails has seen some bloat slowing it down. This means you do need some expertise in creating some scalable applications, but with some prudent caching strategies and the beauty of memcached it’s more than possible. In the medium term these problems will disappear with Ruby 1.9, Enterprise Ruby and Rubinius making Ruby faster and continual Rails optimisations.

I still believe that to get the best of Rails you need some experts, otherwise you’ll never see the flexibility and speed of the technology applied. We are seeing more and more calls for Rails developers and with firms such as the BBC, Endemol, Channel 4 and EMI already on Rails there is going to be a greater need. Hopefully we can continue to get great development expertise in London rather than see RoR degenerate to the state of PHP hacking (not that there aren’t some top-natch PHP outfits out-there).

I think we’ll be working with Rails for a while but we are still working with PHP, Flex, AIR and lots of JQuery as well, but in the future we’ll be looking to work with the best technology around for our clients and our own projects.

Data-based recommendations have really revolutionized marketing and web services, making patterns out of the massive amount of information collected about people in order to give them relevant ads, products, friends and music as well as whole host of other things.

Amazon, for example, tracks my browsing history and buying habits to give me a list of products that I’d hopefully be interested in, and usually their algorithm is spot on. I’ve no doubt that recommendations have contributed greatly to their success.

Likewise, Last.fm indexes my music collection and tracks what I listen to in order to give me recommendations about music I haven’t listened to. Like Amazon, they’re usually give pretty good recommendations.

Delicious is an example of a site that doesn’t make the most of the data it collects. With the amount of sites I’ve bookmarked with their service I’m sure they know what I’m interested in and give me relevant recommendations. Perhaps the data processing power needed is what’s holding them back?

ReadWriteWeb has got a good article on Collaborative Filtering and makes an important point about The Wisdom of Crowds which suggest that “as communities grow, not only does a large (diverse, independent, etc.) community make better decisions than a handful of editors, but the larger a community gets, the better its decisions will be”.

Once you scale past more than a dozen users it soon becomes unpractical to make manual recommendations to people, and computers are pretty good making them themselves. A machine doesn’t need to be ’self aware’ or to actual listen to the music to know what you like. No, what actually usually happens is much more low level - users are grouped based on their listening habits (or whatever else it happens to be), and then users are suggested music based on what other people in their group are listening to.

The fact that it’s so level, means that for a lot of recommendations you don’t need data specific algorithms or code, it’s enough to have a relationship between two entities to get recommendations.

At Made by Many I’ve been working on a plugin for Rails called acts_as_recommendable that makes adding recommendations to your Rails sites a piece of cake! If you have a relationship between books and users, for example, acts_as_recommendable will show you which users are similar and which books a user would probably like to read.

The code is based on the example from the book ‘Programming Collective Intelligence‘ which I really recommend getting. it reveals how collective intelligence can be used in a very practical way with a lot of helpful examples.

A client reported yesterday that members of the Europe-wide internet group of his parent company had reported that UGC (ooh, that ugly term) had crested the wave and was crashing. The evidence given was that a user generated video site in Germany had bombed. 

“Would I like to comment?” He asked. “Well”, I replied, thinking quickly, “For the last hundred years we’ve had mass media - and that was it: now the world’s turning to social media. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing in between. Last year people said editorial was dead; this year people say UGC is dead: neither is true: it’s the pendulum swinging.

Naturally, anyone threatened by social media will search for signs that it’s just a fad (I don’t mean my client, I mean his partner companies). In a way, UGC as we’ve known it is a fad, in that flickr and youtube are phenomena that are unlikely to be repeated in the same way  because, unlike the German video site, they flourished without serious competition.  

JPG is a good example of something in between. The photography magazine sets assignments online and people compete to appear in the glossy print publication (for no payment!) by uploading submissions online. This is editor-as-curator, Read the rest of this entry