Best architecture for a social media app

Question

Im working on promising project that develops a new social media app for web and mobile. We have just started defining functionalities. Nevertheless, I'm thinking ahead on architecture. So I'm asking:

1 - Whats the best platform to develop the core of this application that will have a Rest API interface.

2 - Whats the best database that will scale and grow with my application.

As far as I researched, these were the answers I found most interesting:

For database: Cassandra NoSQL DB, amazing scalability, amazing write performance, good read performance (will be improved on 0.6). I think i will choose that one.

Zookeer for transactions on Cassandra.

I think these 2 technologies are really good for that propose. What do you think guys?

On the front end it will serve the REST API, i don't have a final candidate. For this one i have questions based on Performance X Scalability X Fast Development/Maintenance.

Java or .Net As far as I researched, brings the best balance of this requisites.

Python, pearl and Rail, has the best (Fast Development/Maintenance), but sux on all other.

C or C++ I don't even consider, because its (Fast Development/Maintenance) sux...

So what do you guys think about it?

Answer 1

Take a look at neo4j in terms of the database. It fits nicely with all the requirements of a social network. It is in fact a network database.