Chapter 5. Social Networking Services – Cloning Facebook 1

One of the most dominant Internet services today is the social networking service. According to a report by the Nielsen Company, in January 2010, the amount of time an average person spent on Facebook is more than seven hours per month, which amounts to more than 14 minutes per day. If you lump together the time spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Bing, Wikipedia, and Amazon, it still doesn't beat Facebook! By March 2010, Facebook accounted for more than seven percent of all Internet traffic in the United States, surpassing visits to Google. Social networking services have risen in the past few years to be more than just a passing fad, to be an important communications tool as well as a part of daily life.

We will be building our last and most complex clone based on Facebook, the most popular social networking service as of date. The clone we will build here will be described over this and the next chapter. In this chapter we will cover...