This is the second last chapter in this book and also the first one in a series of two chapters describing how we can clone a social networking service like Facebook. Social networking services are the next step in the evolution of Internet applications and Facebook is currently the most successful incarnation of this service. Cloning Facebook is not difficult though, as can be attested in this chapter and also in the many Facebook 'clones' out there on the Internet. Let's look at what we have covered in this chapter.

First, we went through a whirlwind tour of social networking services and their history, before discussing the most dominant service, Facebook. Next, we described some of its more essential features and we categorized the features into User, Community, and Content sharing features. After that, we went into a high level discussion on these various features and how we implement them in our Facebook clone, Colony. After that, we went briefly into the various technologies used in the clone.

After the technology discussion, we jumped straight into the implementation, starting with a detailed discussion of the data models used in this chapter. Our next chapter is the last chapter in this book. We will finish what we have started in this chapter with a detailed step-by-step description of Colony's application flow, followed with the deployment of Colony on the Heroku cloud platform.