In the interest of time, I will keep this short. If interested, please let me know and I can provide a more detailed proposal. I have extensive experience with web development of social networks. I have read and understood your project description and feel strongly that I can fulfill your requirements to a very high standard. I have extensive experience with a JVM web framework and already have production-ready authentication/authorization modules written that we can utilize immediately for functionalities 1 and 2. I also have built chat systems using WebSockets on this framework. I also have extensive experience with creating RESTful web services within this framework which will allow AJAX functionality to support a real-time newsfeed. I write clean, well-commented, unit-tested code.
As far as a project timeline, this will depend on the pace of our communication, but generally it will be something like: 1) requirement elicitation (1-3 days); 2) formalize specification (3-5 days); 3) implement back-end database and load sample dataset (2 days); 4) implement unstyled views and controllers (10 days); 5) test and iterate (3 days); 6) implement design (5 days); 7) test and iterate (5 days) -- excuse the generic nature of this proposal but until we have had one or two discussions regarding the details of the project I feel it would be premature to delve any deeper.
I greatly appreciate your consideration and hope to speak with you soon!