Comprehensive Social Bookmarking Application

Situation

A Silicon Valley based social book-marking service organization wanted to revamp their existing web presence, including their business goal, in order to attract larger audience. The goal was to create a social book-marking service, which would help in greater content collaboration across the web and provide a variety of delivery mechanisms for publishers to use the service with ease. The end product would be an application catering to B2B as well as B2C market.

Challenge

The system required a portable and customizable design at the front end, supported by rich, efficient and scalable design at the backend. To extend the reach to a larger audience, the service was to be rendered through Plug-in, Bookmark and Browser Extensions, keeping in mind various publishing platforms as well as individual users. A stable and robust Content Management System (CMS), with rich UI, and supporting different locales was also needed to attract this large user base from around the world.

Harbinger Solution

Our first approach was to develop the widget having core business model, collaborating best web 2.0 practices like AJAX and DHTML. The widget used the latest JavaScript framework libraries, JQuery and Prototype, for a rich end-user experience.

The application was made scalable and also developed in the following formats:

• Movable Type plug-in
• Mozilla Firefox extension
• Internet Explorer plug-in
• IE and Firefox browser bookmarks

The client-side widget having rich user interface needed less bandwidth and was very efficient. The different delivery mechanisms to render the widget provided unparalleled extensibility and accessibility. Having these different mechanisms enabled a perfect mix of B2B and B2C usage of the product. The Joomla CMS based website with support for internationalization was very extensible to other locales, and helped the company reach a broad customer base.