I have seen many people trying to start a socialnetwork and dream to be a big success without the proper prepration. So many of such ideas fails. They start by modifying a opensource freely available scripts like, joomla, phpizabi or dolphin. Here i would like to make everybody clear that building a socialnetwork is not the as simple as you would think. Socialnetwork should be the place where people would like to spend their time sharing about their bit of life with their friends in a convinient way. The easier the way you provide, easily you will be accepted in the social networking market. People will love your site for it’s ease of use. You should always remember the user’s goal for comming to your site. People will not just join site for just you tell them. You need to provide them the right tools and the fun of using those tools. The new way to discover the whole of their social life. So if you focus on the user goal and provide them the right tools for interfacing your site. you will be successfull and pull the traffic to your site and that defenitely means the moanetization of your site.
So most of the opensoure socialnetwork scripts you get in the market today are not suitable for the socialnetowork you want to build. Most of them are built clonig the most popular socialnetworks and they definately fail their purpose. If you are really serious about your socialnetwork site and want to build to be the success in the market then you will have to do it from custom. You can use the avaialble website frameworks and build the custom script or code it from ground up for the perfect site you want to make it. Always remember these questions in mind:
What is the purpose of your socialnetowkorking site?
Who will be using it?
For what purpose will they use it and for how long?
Accessibility and scalability.
You should be able to scale your users using the service your socialnetwork provides. Once you get started it doesn’t mean you work is complete. you will have to regularly be checking your site, employ moderators to look after your site. There are many other post implementations after your site will be launched.
So I will highly recommend you to build your own custom framework for your socialnetworking site and not rely on any of the scripts available in the market.
If you want to get your socialnetwork running in the quickest possible time then you have no other choice then using the availabel scripts but if you want to gget serious about your site, you must be able to go to develop a custom solution for your site. You can also later transform your site form the script you had used to the custom solution by importing the datas from the previous site.
There are a whole lot of possibilities for the socialnetworking sites. And the competition is fuious. Only those will succeed who will meet the user’s goal.
Will be posting other articles on socialnetoworking. Till then happy social networking folks.