Tog is a non-intrusive, extensible open source platform that helps you to add social network features to your Ruby on Rails apps. We aim to convert the tedious and long process of create a community site on a straightforward process that will give your site social capabilities in minutes.

We don’t believe in generic social networks. We think every sucessful network has a specific useful social object: Threadless, Vimeo and Flickr are based on the interest and passion that users share about t-shirts, amateur videos and photography. Tog is designed to help you to easily develop these social objects without the hassle of hacking the foundational blocks.

This is the first public release and it’s packed with a pretty good number of initial features. We’ve a huge amount of things to polish and even a few key features to implement but as with any first release the value of getting real and get feedback of the developer community exceeds the small issues that could appear.

We’ve been working on the platform for a few months now, testing its features in real world projects and extracting the most useful parts for the joy of the community. We’ve a long way to go from here as seen on our in-progress roadmap but it’s really satisfying to see the project finally going public and share our efforts with everybody.

We’re going to release a new minor version every two weeks to fix the possible bugs and problems that could appear and try to get the core features stabilized and profoundly tested for end of year with probably a major version then. Since the approach that tog takes about social networks is pretty vertical/specialised the different plugins and modules (photo management, CMS, blogs engine, etc.) would eventually get a decent amount of attention too.

Finally we just want to thanks the Open Source community for all the beautiful code and projects that we’re reusing on tog and that have helped us to develop this project. Now is out turn and by licensing tog as public, open source code we aim to create a vibrant community that will low the entry barrier to create social networks.

So try tog, polish your site with new capabilities, develop a plugin, report us the bugs you find or simply send us your feedback. That would be biggest compliment we can get.