June 3, 2011 Ruby Social Network Status Updater saves you time. Now write more code!

With all of the social media platforms available it’s becoming a tedious task to tell the world that your cat made a funny face or that you are having toast for breakfast this morning. As a public service, we decided to launch a contest to make it easy to post one message to multiple networks. To make it even more fun, we decided to do it in Ruby.

The requirements for our Ruby Social Network Status Updater challenge were simple. Write a small Rails or Sinatra app that allows the user to update their status on Chatter, LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook (any 3). Use OAuth to authorize access to the services and allow the users to choose which networks to send their updates to.

We had five great submissions that met all of the requirements so we decided to bump up the prize money (just because it’s Friday). We didn’t specify a hosting platform but everyone chose Heroku. Mbleigh and raygao finished with the exact same score and each take home first prize money ($750 each). However, since raygao submitted earlier, the scoring engine ranked higher.

Mbleigh‘s Bullhorn submission is visually appealing and extremely slick.

Raygao’s Chouette Social app is the only one of the bunch that included integration with salesforce.com Chatter. Raygao also allows users to change their background and display feeds from their social networks.

Third place, and $400, went to gregr with his submission. I actually think his was my favorite of the group. It was very clean and easy to use.

Fractastical came in fourth ($200) while kzer95 came rounded out the top 5 ($100). Great job by everyone and we look forward to more Ruby submissions!