New version of My Movie List is on the server. The “friends” functionality was re-built and optimised for performance, and now profiles/movie lists of all users can be viewed (not only friends’ ones).

Next we want to make the site more engaging when users sign-up for the first time. Isn’t it a problem of many social networking websites? Registered - no friends yet… nothing to do. A solution to that problem comes in the form of functionality that allows users to search for friends who are already on that particular network and to notify those that are not. On many sites this is done semi-automatically by pulling a list of contacts from other websites (Googlemail, Yahoo, etc.) if their API allows to do that. Something we want to implement as well.

We also have to make some content public. This will show visitors what My Movie List is about and give some food to the search engine spiders.

You want a bespoke web application to be developed, whether to automate your business or to create a new service or portal on the web. Which technology should you go for? There are three mainstream technologies for building web-based applications: .NET, Java and PHP. If you approach different development companies and each of them advocates that the one they use is the best, which one should you listen to?

You might browse the internet to find the answer, but most articles comparing technologies are written by technical people for technical people.

My advice is (unless your budget is over a million, and you have a substantial investment to make in a feasibility study): do not bother about the technology itself. Find a good team and go with the technology this team is proficient in. There are too many factors contributing to the success of a web software project and for most projects technology is not a major one.

Application security, reliability and performance will depend on the ability of your developers to design and develop with security, reliability and performance in mind – it’s as simple as that.