Comments on: 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Networking Site

By: conticreative

conticreative — Fri, 28 May 2010 01:53:55 +0000

I have built several social websites with Jomsocial, based on Joomla.
Paired with some other Open Source and commercial extensions for Joomla it can be very powerful. It’s fairly easy to manage but I wouldn’t suggest for a newbie to build their own site.
Ning is phasing out their free service (expect a dramatic drop of their user base) so it’s no longer a choice for free social sites but it’s a pretty good choice for low cost.

I have also tried some stand alone scripts and the old Community Builder for Joomla. Some are old (CB) but still valid for some uses. Some are just too clunky and support is minimal.

If I had to build my own right now I’d use Jomsocial. The price is right, not to difficult to implement (takes me an afternoon to build a site, but I had a steep learning curve – some of the features need to be tweaked a bit to work) and it’s very powerful.

By: Noam

Noam — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:27:46 +0000

Another great script to check out is SocialEngine (http://www.socialengine.net).

By: Connie Watts

Connie Watts — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:04:13 +0000

Very well written article and you have several sites listed that I hadn’t heard of before. Thank you!

By: Jonjon

Jonjon — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:39:37 +0000

Ning is da best

By: Ray (Using the Fatsoma Promotion Platform)

Ray (Using the Fatsoma Promotion Platform) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:21:54 +0000

This article is really informative. It is amazing how rapidly companies are becoming increasingly involved with social media sites. I read recently that Dell have made $3million from Twitter alone, $2million of which is from direct sales through the Twitter page. Another interesting set of stats is that there are over 300 million active accounts on Facebook, and approximately 70% of these interact with companies through the social medium resulting in a significant effect on buying intention and satisfaction.

Take my company Fatsoma, an online promotion platform, for example. One of their key selling points is that their promotional websites for nightlife promoters come fully integrated with Facebook for viral marketing and even online ticket sales. Also, many clients are made through interacting and networking with promoters through social media, and in particular Myspace.

Basically the point I am trying to make is that social media is vitally important in the modern Web 2.0, new media era for all companies as it is no longer acceptable to talk at consumers, we all must now talk with them.

By: ESL Jobs Connect

ESL Jobs Connect — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:05:22 +0000

We used Joomla and the JomSocial extension to build our site, http://www.esljobsconnect.com

We chose Joomla because of its flexibility with various module extensions that can integrated with the base Joomla engine.

By: Steven Snell

Steven Snell — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:59:01 +0000

I can’t really say that I have a favorite because my experience is more as a user of social networking sites as opposed to developing them. If I was planning to develop a social news (voting) site I would look into Drupal first.

By: Link

Link — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:07:44 +0000

Thanks man. I’ve been wanting to move away from the forum thing to the social networking one for some time now. Thanks a million. I don’t recall you stating which one is your favorite though. So, which is it?

By: U

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:45:56 +0000

Could you please tell me whichi one can use in China?
Thank you very much.

By: willdonovan

willdonovan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:47:05 +0000

I have attempted to use Ning, it can be clunky however is a very scalable platform.

I have also used Crowdvine. The feel is similar to Ning however we used it for the UX Australia 2009 conference and it was AMAZING to interact with. Had great promotion of other people values (very social, I know). I think you can customise Crowdvine greatly for more social interaction.

For the UX Australia conference there was a ‘want to meet’ feature which you could then go back to later and tick them off.