Smynx side-project launches

 For the last few months, we've been quietly working away on a social software project called Smynx. It's a simple premise: get more variety in your life by finding interesting ideas for things to do, and arrange to try them with your friends or other people near you. You can add your own ideas, rate, comment, tag, and even create little sketches!

More than anything else, the project has been an opportunity for us to experiment with a number of interesting technologies and techniques that we can now start to apply across our other product and service offerings.

• We've experimented with geographical algorithms, not just for finding and suggesting events near you, but also personalising example text, RSS feeds, and other small details.
• We've harnessed the 'wisdom of crowds', so that users can not just create their own content, but they can also add value (comment, tag, sketch) to others' content, and flag inappropriate content (with an automatic removal after a number of reported incidents).
• The UI has been greatly enhanced through AJAX, including a specially developed Sketch Pad (check out the sketch pad on the iPhone too - there's a special version on there).
• We've been using the Ruby on Rails framework, which we've taken the best bits from for Amaxus 4.
• The entire web application is hosted 'in the cloud' on Amazon EC2, and uses Amazon S3 for automated rotating back-ups. We're now adding in special functionality to Amaxus 4 so that we can offer one of the first CMS products designed specifically to take advantage of cloud computing.
• We've launched with a public API, rather than releasing one in a later phase.
• All content on the site is available to re-use under a Creative Commons license.

Although Smynx was originally designed to give people inspiration for their personal lives, working on the project has given all of us at Box UK huge inspiration for new ways of using technology.

If you'd like to know more about the project, or how we could help you with new technology, please get in touch.