Remember what I said in my New Years post about releasing something big and serious? Well, it might be a bit premature to mention this, but a friend and I are looking at throwing together a social site built around a certain type of activity. (No, it's not sex.) Details are (purposely) light at the moment, but as things progress I'll be talking more and more about it, no doubt.

Anyway, here we are, with an idea, and how we figure things will work, at least on the user side of things. This morning, my mind was filled with ideas on how to start implementing things. We're looking at building the site with ASP.NET (I bought Programming ASP.NET 3.5 for a reason) but I'm thinking more about the database side of things — how we'll store user profiles, connections, the actual objects of importance for the social application, etc. After all, there's more than a few different ways to do this, depending on what .NET technologies we'd like to use.

It doesn't help that we haven't answered all the questions about how things will operate, but so far our individual assumptions more or less line up nicely. One of the things I'm working on as I play mind games with myself about the whole thing is documenting how things flow in the application from a user perspective (in prose, happy little diagrams, and some pseudo-UML diagrams using PowerPoint and/or OpenOffice.org Draw). At the same time, I'm boning up on ASP.NET, picking up on things I ignored or forgot in college, and learning about new things added since I left.

I doubt we'll be in any kind of shape for even a private beta until perhaps May or June. Two people devoting 5-10 hours a week to a project like this doesn't give me much hope that things will progress quickly. But we'll see.

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