Followers and following. Is this on the blockchain or is it only implemented by the webpage?
I could dig through the code of piston and see if there is any mention of it, or even make the effort to read the whitepaper. But I am just posting off the top of my head here. I believe that the follower/following thing is an additional database controlled by the webserver of steemit.com. I don't think you can find this information on the blockchain. I'd be glad to have someone who knows to correct me, but I have a pretty good idea already that I won't be corrected.
This is something that I have been figuring out for a little while, the last few days. The blockchain only controls the process of interacting with your wallet and posting and voting. Everything else is external. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from implementing more blockchains that link to this, using apps that talk to both Steem and these sidechains.
To be properly distributed and secure against malicious manipulation, new features would necessarily need a sidechain. I have already had the idea of creating a namecoin-like blockchain for implementing groups within Steem. If I have not missed my guess, there might also need to be an association blockchain for these kinds of social network link databases, like groups, friends, and so on. It would not be hard to add other system interfaces that for example implement peer to peer exchanges, like steem<->bitcoin steem<->dash, and so on.
The sky is the limit, I think. I am no kind of malicious hacker type, I do get a bug up my butt when I see people exploiting weaknesses in a protocol and I am in this position of having such a bad 'reputation' score mainly because I couldn't, instead of disappearing offensive posters (offensive, as in, abusive) who have big power, and I took on a whale on this. Either I am stupid or stupidly brave trying - but the point I am making is that this is just the beginning. We need to foster an ecosystem of steem platform developers. We can add value to this network so easily, and make a mint helping. If this blows up, like I think it will, we could well see 'steem' replacing 'bitcoin' on the lips of the general public who are aware of these things.
10k1 actually am not sure about the steem piston follow api route but radiator is now finished and it exposes those route very nicely through rails https://github.com/inertia186/radiator
I am quite excited that someone has built something. It seems to me like the hierarchy of Steem external systems per language goes: Javascript, Python and Ruby
Whatever the Ruby people make, will be implemented in Python and JS pretty quickly.
Yea very likely :) my motivation for switching to ruby was also the fact that it is faster then python.
I guess the whole idea behind was to encourage people do things you are talking about now.
However, more common way to do it would be organizing a team of like-minded people first rather than doing it on your own
Trying to gather a group of people to do this is exactly what I am trying to do. I think I must be going the wrong way about this. I have had to think long and hard about what I am doing here, and the only answer I seem to be able to come up with is this: just make the solutions, and the people will come. I am wasting my time asking questions, although steevc gave enough of an answer to get me moving on the right path. It sounds like I will have to make additions to the piston codebase to create a way to do this. It doesn't matter if it 'takes a long time' to get the data. That's what a computer is for, to perform time consuming tasks that are difficult to perform manually.
I am not directly interested in this at the moment because my particular projects do not require this until quite some time later in their development. I will focus on what is in front of me and document my solutions as I go, and maybe I will both find people who have the open development attitude I have been used to in the open source community, as well as winning fans from those who are coming up just behind me.
Just make solutions, and the people will come is a great statement. I hope you'll master it.
My understanding is that posts and comments are stored in the blockchain.
I haven't dug into it enough to verify it for myself. However, the tools at http://steemtools.com/ are a pretty good indicator that posts and user accounts are on the blockchain.