25 Best Social Networking Platforms to Start your own Service

Social networking websites have been around since the mid-90’s, but in recent years, social networking has exploded across the web. The Web 2.0 initiative has made modern social networking sites increasingly popular and easier to use than the initial wave of sites that launched in the 90’s.  It’s super important these days to have a presence on social media sites. Did you know that Facebook in 2009 had more than 300 million users, and roughly half of these logged in every day? I can also tell you that twitter attracted more than 22 million unique visitors every month and YouTube had more than 100 million users in the US alone. Do you think these numbers will grow in 2010? There may still be niches waiting for someone to launch a dedicated service – in theory this could be you. In fact it is not that hard any more as you will see in this article.

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A social networking service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user, his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, share ideas, discuss shared concerns etc. The value can be huge for the involved individuals which of course is why so many people have adopted social networking.

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Lets take a look at how easy it has become to create a new social networking service. As the area have matured we have seen fully functional platforms show up to make it a no-brainer to get started. In this article you will find 25 excellent platforms to pick from.

1. SocialEngine

SocialEngine is community software that you install on your own web server, giving you 100% ownership of your social network’s user data and content. You can use SocialEngine to create various kinds of communities with different frameworks, like Twitter-style followers or Facebook-style friendships. SocialEngine also has an active development community with hundreds of addons, templates, and themes. The software also includes a drag-and-drop CMS for easily customizing your community’s layout.

2. SourceForge

Sorceforge is the world’s largest opensource software development web site. We provide free services that help people build cool stuff and share it with a global audience.

3. Ning

Ning is the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social network. Design a custom social experience in under 30 seconds giving you the power to mobilize, organize and inspire.

4. Elgg

Elgg.com is where you can get a network up and running in minutes. With support from the Elgg team and plenty of customization options, you can make it exactly how you want it

5. Xoops with Yogurt Extension

XOOPS is a web application platform written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more.

6. BuddyPress

BuddyPress is completely free and open source. Unlike hosted services, BuddyPress allows you to stay in control of your site and create a totally customized, unique experience

7. KicKapps

KickApps provides solutions that enable the creation and management of next generation web experiences. These solutions are social, interactive, dynamic, distributed, and data-informed. KickApps solutions consist of a suite of hosted media applications and services that are used by some of the world’s largest websites and brands to grow & engage their online audiences and foster deeper relationships with customers.

8. Mahara

Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning ‘think’ or ‘thought’ in Te Reo M?ori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.

9. Insoshi

It’s a place to keep tabs on your favorite developers and projects, easily contribute fixes and new features, and visualize what’s going on inside your codebase!

10. Lovd By Less

Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is a social networking solution that has everything you need to build your community

11. Anahita Social Engine

Anahita Social Engine  is an open source platform, framework, and design methodology for building all kinds of social networking applications and services using an organic Nodes-Graphs-Stories architecture. Anahita is available under the Gpl2 License

12. MixxT

The mixxt GmbH is a provider of innovative Social Network and Online Community solutions and operator of the European Community platform mixxt. mixxt lets everyone create an individual Community and helps making communication and organization easier and more efficient. Community hosts can directly get in contact with their customers or target group and present themselves as interactive and innovative, without renouncing privacy, structure or an own design

13. AroundMe

Using AROUNDMe collaboration server you can create multiple collaborative group, webspace, community or social networking websites. Each group can create a multiple page collaborative web site. They get social tools such as a guestbook (a wall), a group blog, a forum and a wiki which they can drop into web pages. Each group is fully customisable using xHTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Groups can be private or public.

14. JomSocial

Customize profile fields.
Create groups. Invite friends.
Send private messages. Comment on walls.
Share photos. Follow updates via activity stream.
Integrate 3rd party components with our robust API.

15. Yacs

• Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network @techcrunch.com
• List of Social Networking Platforms, Community Platforms @web-strategist.com
• Social Networking Software @webbizideas.com

Dustin Betonio

Dustin Betonio is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University.