Top 10 Tools/Ruby Gems for Quickly Building Social Networking Sites

Ruby on Rails offer you rapid development, it comes packed with a horde of gems to make the work even easier. Check out some of the best Ruby gems for building social networking websites:

1. mailboxer/mailboxer : mailboxer is a core message system. This gem is a part of the social_stream framework for building social networks. It allows any model to act as messageable. You can exchange messages between different messageable models. You can even add attachments. With this gem, you can create conversations with multiple recipients. It manages an inbox, sentbox, trash for conversations and also provides an option to send notifications via email.

2. Ryanto/actsasvotable : This gem allows records to be vote-able. It allows any model to be voted on, like/dislike, upvote/downvote, etc. And it provides an easy to write/read syntax.

3. mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on : Acts As Taggable On is a tagging plugin for Rails applications. It provides the ability to have multiple tag contexts on a single model in ActiveRecord. Tag clouds, related items and taggers and more are also supported by this plugin. Along with dynamic contexts, it allows custom tagging as well.

4. tcocca/actsasfollower : This gem can be used to allow any model to follow any other model. Through a double polymorphic relationship you can accomplish this on the Follow model. Built in support for blocking/unblocking follow records is also available in this gem. The main use of gem is for users to follow other users or for users to follow books.

Read about other 6 gems here : http://www.railscarma.com/blog/technical-articles/top-10-tools-ruby-gems-quickly-building-social-networking-sites/