New Rails app: MOG.com
Posted by josh June 22, 2006 @ 04:57 AM
You may have seen MOG mentioned on BoingBoing or elsewhere earlier this week. It's the new social networking site that lets music lovers connect based on what they're into, keep a blog about their musical discoveries, and find new things to appreciate based on their friends' recommendations. It even has this MOG-O-MATIC plugin for iTunes so that it can figure out what you listen to without you having to tell it. Even if you don't have your music tagged.
That's all pretty cool, but for the readers of this blog, the really cool part is that MOG is written entirely in Ruby on Rails. The MOG software is the creation of Lucas Carlson, Dave Fayram, and Joshua Sierles. It's a nice piece of work, serving up 1.5M requests per day using Pound, Mongrel and memcached, and they are still tuning it for performance. The app also includes an XML-RPC interface used by the plugin (though Dave says now he thinks REST might have been a better way to go).
So tune your internet dial to mog.com and take a listen...

So it’s rather like http://www.last.fm/ then?
Isn’t this just like last.fm, and other similar sites?
Other sites? The only one I’ve seen it rips off is last.fm. Even down to the elongated rounded rectagles used as list items. Biggest difference I see between it and last.fm is that Mog is dog-slow right now.
i can’t google pound. what is it? link please?
No, it is more like last.fm meets MySpace.
Honda, you’ll never make it and you’re dumb for trying. Toyota already exists.
“can’t google pound”
maybe your google is broken then ;)
my google yields… oh well, you might as well check it out yourself: http://www.google.nl/search?q=Pound%2C+Mongrel (1st hit)
its an alternative to lighttpd or apache as load-balancing entry point to your mongrel cluster. and it looks nice: the configure script is much larger than all the code of pound itself!
_cies.
Yes. It doesn’t matter what it’s powered by. They have got a lot more to prove than they have in the various promotional blurbs (including this one) that they are doing anything innovative.
Not that there weren’t photo sharing sites before flickr, but they got the proving done.
While users of MOG shouldn’t care what it’s powered by, I assume people reading this blog are interested in success stories of Rails app development. And innovation isn’t the only thing that makes a successful product – if there were no room for competition, the first one out the gate with a new concept would always win. If that were the case, Microsoft wouldn’t sell the most popular windowing UI in the world. MOG’s only been in public beta for a week, so I think they deserve a bit more time to prove themselves.
Very cool
This is also very similar to Kick.com, a company that did this back in 2000.
Pretty Cool
that song download tool is a bit lame.