Let's Get Friendly

About the Client

Segue was approached by an entrepreneur with the desire to develop an application to integrate with Facebook. Their idea was to create a tool which allows people interested in developing romantic relationships to determine whether or not there is mutual interest within their existing Facebook friends. “Let’s Get Friendly” allows you to anonymously tag a friend as someone you’d like a deeper relationship with. The rest is up to them! If they do the same to you, only then will you be notified that you’re like minded in taking things further.

The Challenge

Working with Facebook’s API can be a difficult proposition. First, there are a number of restrictions on how your application can interact with Facebook and its users. Secondly, there are frequent changes and updates to Facebook’s platform. The changes to privacy settings are well-known, but there are several tweaks to existing technical capabilities that can have dramatic impacts on the functionality of any application designed to integrate with the API.

The Solution

The custom application was written in PHP, and included a great deal of abstraction to ease future modifications that may be required to adapt to Facebook’s changing platform. Integration with Facebook was done using the Facebook PHP and JavaScript SDKs. The site is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 virtual servers, using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) to manage traffic and Relational Database Service (RDS) for managing uploaded user content. By hosting on Amazon, the client was able to experience significant cost savings by taking advantage of Amazon’s free usage tier and paying only for the services used as the site takes off and more resources are added to handle the additional traffic.