I allways like see real cases and good projects, every day I search good application or websites around the world, and some days ago I found a cool social network maded with Ruby On Rails.

www.liveforfame.com

The project is focused in share favorite music in streaming format, pictures, messages and other features. Other users can vote in other users to increase the popularity. Besides the interesting features the site also has a cool design. Really easy to use and beauty.

After spending a few hours uploading songs, listening and surfing. I thought it would be possible to interview the creators of the project, because is allways good learn with other experiences and the project was maded with Rails.

So, I found Andrew Cornett (designer and developer working on LiveForFame project),really nice guy that gave this interview.

1- Hello Andrew, let’s start. Introduce your self and your job.

I’m a 21 year old design student named Andrew Cornett from Alameda, California. Currently, I’m a UI / graphic designer for ReadyTech Corporation in Oakland, California.

2- Explain what is liveforfame and what is the goal of the website.

Live for Fame is a new social networking site that’s focus is on quality content and users.

3- It’s important remember the app was maded with rails. For me the project looks like a diferent kind of social network, you used something like insoshi or lovedbyless to serve as the beginning?

We actually built the site completely on our own. But we did follow some great examples and books such as RailsSpace (the author made insoshi after publishing railsspace?)

We chose not to use a prebuilt platform because we wanted to only include the features we needed, so the application was as simple as possible to start with.

4- In UI of liveforfame we can see many common components in Web 2.0 apps like cover-flow widget use to show user images, if I am not mistaken, except for mp3 player everything is javascript,css and xhtml. What you think about other RIA tecnologies like Adobe Flex?

The coverflow widget we use on the user’s profiles is a JavaScript component called “ImageFlow” and can be found with some googling. Flex is a very rich platform, and will be fun to see what people do with it in the future. We plan on building some flex/flash/air based apps to integrate with Live for Fame to show off your star score, what you like, and other things. The very first widget we are working on is a “radio player” which you can run locally, and use to listen to the music uploaded to Live for Fame. We think this will be a much more convenient way to listen to the music on L4F.

5- The site is still young, but in my opnion has great potential to become popular. One of the differential of other social networks is the ability to listen the songs from other users. For me it’s is a really cool feature and I lost some time of my day searching for good music. The American justice is hard with subjects like copyright, you expect to have any problem related to that some day?

As any site becomes more popular (and makes some form of profit), there are going to be people who want to get some of that money if they feel entitled to it. In our terms of service and privacy agreements, we make it very clear that the user is solely responsible for the content they submit to Live for Fame. We encourage users to upload content they create, as that is what will make you famous. When the site grows in popularity we can start enforcing these rules more, but right now it seems pretty silly to tell people to take down the copyrighted tunes.

6- You can talk about the time spent on the project?

Mike Taylor and I got into Ruby on Rails around December of 2007. We spent much of the winter break researching books and tutorials to try and piece together what we were trying to make. In early February, Michael Perry, Mike Taylor, and I sat down and tried hard to draw out what we wanted the site to be, and then set to work. We were able to build and launch the early application by May 16th, 2008.

7- Can you say where the project is hosted?

We are running on a Media Temple Dedicated Virtual server.

8- You want to have some profit with project such as advertising or sponsors?

We have a very big idea for the advertising on Live for Fame. It’s going to be a system that actually gives back to the users of the community.

9- I saw on your blog that you also like 3D, which your favorite software? You also use a Mac for design in 3d?

For 3D I love love love Cinema4D, its the easiest interface I’ve used so far… very easy to pick up. I use a Mac for most of my design work.

10- I have heard people saying that it is impossible to be a good designer and programmer at the same time. I particularly desagree, what you think about this?

I disagree with this also. Just look at places like silver orange. Most of the people there argue that this is also false. I think it is very important that the designer also understand the code. Maybe they don’t have to be crazy into it, like writing huge algorithms and such, but they should understand enough to be able to communicate clearly with developers and write clean concise code. To me design and code go hand in hand, and very rarely do I only do one.

11- You working in other projects for web now?

I mainly am trying to stay focused on school and work aside from Live for Fame, but I have a few good things I am working on getting out soon. One is a web designers “sketchbook” or design tool that you can use to sketch possible designs in a 800×600 scale window. It would include a simple vector web browser and the viewport contains a grid. I also want to build up the motion design community online to involve more of a younger audience. There isn’t many places aside from Motionographer and I think there should be something more interactive. Just some things on the backburner. Thanks so much for taking the time to interview me for your blog, Daniel, very cool

Many thanks Andrew and good luck with your projects.