Social networking that doesn't rely on language

April 9, 2008 8:23 PM

Niche social networking setup that relies on symbols/emoticons and pre-set phrases to communicate?

I need to quickly set up a social network to connect a bunch of people all around the globe. There aren't really multi-lingual social networks, and the ones that do exist (Badoo, QuePasa) put a heavy emphasis on dating and aren't customizable.

Basically, I need a mix of Ning and Facebook, with the ability to sort people by the info they've entered (location, industry, etc). The reason those two systems won't work is that I don't want there to be a default language.

That's where the symbols or pre-set phrases come in - if I selected Greeting -> "Good morning!" it could display in the default language of the viewer, having been translated through the system. (Club Penguin has a similar phrase selection thing...in their case, it's to make convos safe for kids, but here it's an issue of spoken language.) Making sense so far?


Here are the needs the site needs to address:

- global coordination, everyone who signs up is pinpointed on a map and perhaps connected regionally (a la Facebook)

- expertise location, depending on the game community needs (sorted by ticking a checkbox, so it could be translatable to the viewer's default language?)

- statistics, who's playing where, what are their skills and expertise

- personal profiles and hanging out with the community at large (again like Facebook, just using a menu of symbols or pre-set words)


The catch with all of this is that I am not a programmer, although I can pull together resources as necessary...so, I really need advice. Are there any open source social network platforms available that would serve these needs? How would I go about making this thing a reality?

posted by lhall to computers & internet (2 comments total)

What you are describing is very achievable since you have such a nice, clear specification but I am not aware of any pre-existing solutions. I hope you find one as it's a great idea.
posted by unSane at 10:25 PM on April 9, 2008

As far as I know (there will inevitably be people who chime in who are more into the whole "social networking" sphere of development, though I have a bit of experience) there is most definitely not an available, easy to use, plug-and-play sort of "platform" that lets you throw together whatever you want. Instead, there are a lot of completing solutions and most of them want you to hook up with the underlying brand, e.g., Facebook Apps.

What you'd need to do to make this a reality is do some Development. Which is always the annoying part about neat new ideas.

As far as prior implementations, the only thing I know of to have used a non-/omni-linguistic chat system off the top of my head is the system that was used inside of the early MMO Phantasy Star Online.

Sounds neat - if you want some dev/consultation/advice, drop me a Mefimail!
posted by blacklite at 11:44 PM on April 9, 2008