social media developer skill set

Question

I am a web developer in ASP.NET from last 6 years, but new to social media.

1. What all skills, technology should have a developer to develop the social media application.
2. What is the role of developer in social media.
3. Any book, RSS feeds, twitter, blog etc for further reference.

Edit: I am asking about building application on the top of social media sites.

Answer 1

Scalability is something you will encouter in social media apps a lot more than elsewhere. High Scalability is a good place to look for advice and articles about how others are doing it.

Answer 2

The most important thing to learn first is not HOW to build it, but WHAT to build. My recommendation is to start with the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.

Answer 3

I second High Scalability. Get a handle on the NoSQL communities as well. Key-value datastores are used frequently in social networking as it is an excellent example of workloads that will destroy performance of an RDBMS.