Developers who are on assignments building a social networking web site come across the issue that there isn’t any specific definition of this. There’s some functionality, which is considered as social network services. Moreover, the target audience has to be specifically defined – without that, any social network would not progress even with any functionality at hands.

So which functionality can be considered as social networking? Surprisingly but over the third of such functionality is allocated in simple networks: registration, search, voting, user profiles, administration, SEO, forums. The source of social networks is the news sites with forums (the so called “portals”).

Web 2.0 gave an opportunity for closer virtual communications: personal blogs, comments, RSS, tags, interaction with friends. Primarily visitors and not the site admins as before do filling out with content here.

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Recently, Google Widget Toolkit attracted attention of web developers from all over the world. GWT is a great technology for AJAX development actually. It helps to get rid of many head-aches associated with cross-browser development, user interaction and development cycle.

The library provides unprecedented possibilities to build Web 2.0 applications with high level of interactivity. And there is a trap.

Often, the user interface of web-applications is simpler to build than desktop UIs due to two factors.First, the HTML/CSS ecosystem provides for a great number of tools to easily express designers vision.
And there is no need to build/run/debug cycle for the web-pages. Second, HTML provides for a significantly lower level of interactivity that is encapsulated by browser. So developers don’t need to debug each.

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