I meet interesting guy at meet-up, or friend of friends. that's why I build meetcliv.com It collect & analyze the information from web and let u meet the guy u want to meet. :)
go for ruby and pick it up in 10 mins.
do 1 thing at 1 time and make it best.
web socket isn't that hard. I use it in my project. be sure what client(browsers) you are going to support, it won't work for Ie7&6 (or older chrome & ff)
1) socket.io 2) faye.jcoglan.com 3) eventmachine 4) xmpp
to use 1&2 is faster & easier, however, for example faye doesn't support event handler currently(but soon in v0.7 )
And faye also kind of hard to extend.
In my opinion, use redis(support pub/sub) & eventmachine (or something like it). to build ur backend.
use websocket-js for client.
:)
go typekit and find some. whatever fonts u need can load from cloud & it's fast.
Traditional Chinese is better, because even people from china can read them. but for example Simplified, some Taiwanese and HonKongese can't read.