I selected to acquire and read the book "Designing Social Interfaces" not by coincedence. Loyal readers know that I'm working myself on a social photo sharing platform called JungleDragon. This book is about the social patterns one should consider implementing when designing a social application. It covers a wide range of patterns, most of which you should be familiar with already as a user of social web applications and services. 

The key benefit of this book is that the patterns it recommends are based on a lot of experience by the authors, making this a good best practices book. For example, it explains how to select the best reputation system, how to deal with invites, friending, commenting, identities, rating, activity streams, and much, much more. In a way, you can heavily lean on the hard work done by the authors and just cherry pick the advise based on your own situation. You can use this book as a reference or read it cover to cover. 

All in all I found this to be a very good book. It is very much up-to-date, comprehensive, credible, richly illustrated with tons of examples in full color,  and well researched. I have two pages full of notes to directly apply to my own project, ranging from new ideas to things I overlooked. In that sense, a worthy investment. I also think this is one of the few books I own that I will revisit as a reference. I found the writing style to be professional and correct, but quite dry and free of any humor.

Concluding, I would recommend this book. But not to anyone:

• This book is mostly for developers building social web experiences for the consumer web. If you are implementing a comment system on your blog, this book is overkill. Although there is a chapter on the social web in the enterprise, it feels like it is added as an afterthought. The same applies to the chapter on mobile web applications.
• This book is largely based on Yahoo's social patterns, which are free to use outside this book. If you simply want to cherry pick some patterns, there is no need to buy this book.
• The book somewhat assumes that you are doing a large project and that you have sufficient resources for large implementation tracks. Each pattern explains how you should apply it, but mostly as a one liner, without considering the costs and effort involved in building such a feature. For example "let users import their contact and friends from their address book and services like Twitter and Facebook" is an easy thing to say, but incredibly hard to implement for a small development project.
• Given that this book is so recent and up-to-date and that the social web is moving at such a fast pace, I wonder how long this book will last before it is outdated.

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