We wish to have an social media site constructed based on a specific approach for users and their mode of interaction, to implement a type of chat-room. It will be applied to our collection of businesses.

Basic functionality:
- users join based on simple signup (email) or other social account (facebook, twitter - other future release)
- users create a basic profile that can be pre-populated direct from facebook or twitter
a location (venue) has a wall on which people can put posts;
- users can check-in and make comments to other posts;
- users can view the wall (time sequence of posts) or the users who are checked-in or joined (a list)
- users can send a direct message to other joined or checked-in users to start a 2 way conversation
- users can view other profiles, restricted by privacy settings of a person's profile.
- the echowaves.com MIT license ruby rails framework is the starting point for this functionality.

Background

We have compiled a detailed functional specification & design including detailed page layouts.
To minimize development we wish to re-use an open-source framework based on ruby on rails www.echowaves.com
This first release is for
- website (no artistic design, standard CSS templates okay)
- back-end / database and persistence
- ability to support mobile device browsers (iphone and blackberry initially - NOT an application a re-skinned website) as well as standard web browsers e.g. layout specific to mobile browser reduced window size

We have some constraints for the development approach including
- ruby on rails
- restful interface (to allow future expansion to mobile apps)
- open source framework echowaves (www.echowaves.com) - unless an alternative ruby on rails can be suggested