=head1 Flox: A Free Social Networking Site

Friendster, Tribe, and now Google's Orkut - it seems like in early 2004,
everyone wanted to be a social networking site. At the time, I was too
busy to be a social networking site, as I was working on my own project
at the time, a web application server called Maypole. However, I
realised that if I could implement a social networking system using
Maypole, then Maypole could probably do anything.

I'd already decided there was room for a free, open-source networking
site, and then Peter Sergeant came up with the hook - localizing it to
universities and societies, and tying in meet-ups with restaurant
bookings. I called it Flox, partially because it flocks people together
and partially because it's localised for my home town of Oxford and its
university.

Flox is still in, uh, flux, but it does the essentials. In this chapter,
we're going to see how it was put together, and how the techniques shown
in the L<Request.pod> chapter can help to create a sophisticated web
application. Of course, I didn't have this manual available at the time,
so it took a bit longer than it should have done...