How to build a social network site ?? Has the cost of building a social network site dropped ??

How to build a social network site?? Has the cost of building a social network site drops to near zero Yet?? My Analysis, First we had the $500 copycats, now Open Source is catching up to the Game!

PLENTY of firms are trying and wanting to profit from today's gold rush of the so-called social networking sites after the success -or at least popularity- of Facebook, Linkedin, Hi5, and other such sites like Twitter or Multiply. Making the cost of entry for new players to become lower than all time.

Facebook may be one of the fastest-growing social network sites, but its technology is far from unique. Besides all existing entrenched competitors, small software firms are also selling scripts that allow anyone to start a Facebook look-alike copy-cat website for three-digit figures. Of course, those new sites do not have any of the third-party applications integrated nor do they have any significant number of users when they start up, but those also help dilute the novelty appeal of the concept. Consider web mail: at one point all web mails were the same, until Google came along and reinvented the concept with its GMail.

And now, even Open Source software is getting into the game of offering anyone the ability to create their own social network. All bad news for Facebook and the others which will continue to see competing sites mushrooming. In short, its underlying technology is not unique at all and, being a web service in the "cloud", can be easily copied. Copycat sites are appearing all over the Internet and targeting different kinds of market niches, whereas Facebook and friends Only positions themselves as the "one size fits all" of social networks.

How to build a social network site ?? Has the cost of building a social network site dropped ??

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A firm from India sells a script to run your own "face book" site for £210. Now Open Source software are offering similar or better abilities to create social network sites FREE.

For instance, there's a handful of popular Facebook clones in operation in China (www.readwriteweb.com), and those have been in operation for a Very long time, even way before Facebook landed with its own website. About six months ago there was a good comparison of existing Facebook clones published read more (www.readwriteweb.com).

In Russia, Facebook had to face Vkontakte, the locally-developed, Russian language social network website when it decided to land in the country with a Russian-language Facebook last year. And in Germany there was StudiVZ, sued by Facebook as it claimed it was a "counterfeit product" due to the similar look and feel.

But while most of the high-end Social media clones already in operation were likely developed in-house, last year 2008 we saw plenty of small outfits trying to profit from the social Media networking gold rush by selling turnkey website solutions - scripts written in PHP or other server side languages - for around $500 or even less. These allow anyone with a web site hosting account or server to create his/her own basic Facebook copycat site. Of course, without the complexity and array of the third features of the real ones - much less the amount of susers in their database.

What shocked this scribbler however is the sheer number of people who continue trying to create their own social network web site from scratch by hiring freelance programmers, and hoping to hit gold as if there were not enough Hi5s, LinkedIns and Facebooks in the webosphere already - see (www.scriptlance.com) or (www.getafreelancer.com). Of course, the availability of lots of search engines didn't stop a pair of clever guys back when from creating Google. But we can't help but think there's a bubble of sorts in this socialmedia network websites craze.

The only apparent reasons to start coding and creating a new Facebook clone website from scratch seem to be,

(a) if you have a revolutionary idea for new features -in other words you want to create the Facebook killer that doesn't resemble any of the existing websites. Or

(b), you want to target a special / independent market niche which requires some special needs. For the rest, the small shops offering ready-made turnkey website solutions can be more than enough to have Your very own Facebook alike site up and running in a matter of hours or days rather than waiting those long months to see it functioning. Why would anyone want to run a social media website, well, that's a different question all together. Unless of course you have a very specific not released market niche in mind.

How to build a social network site ?? Has the cost of building a social network site droped ??

Some commercial FB clone offerings:

One such piece of code that claims to offer a "face book clone" - notice the very wise wording and spacing :) - is dubbed Kootali (www.agriya.com) and sold by "Agriya info way" a firm from Chennai, India. The firm is selling its server side application for $297, £210 or €232 and for that you get "99.9% source code", whatever that missing 0.1 per cent means.

Another company that has been offering for quite some time its own social networking software "like Facebook" calls it "www.socialgroupie.com and it sells for $490, £345 or €384.

The CMS approach:

Others build a "facebook clone" on top of existing Content Management System (CMS) back end software, like the popular Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and so many others. One such scripts is dubbed "www.kickwork.com and is listed over here. Ebizon charges between $900 and $3000 per project for customization.

Open Source enters the picture:

And as if all this wasn't enough, and the barrier of entry wasn't already low enough with £200 scripts from India, there's now Joomunity described as "a facebook clone for Joomla" in other words, a community site and social network built on top of the popular Joomla CMS.

Joomunity (my.joomunity.org), of which version 1.1.0 beta3 has been released two weeks ago is GNU/GPL Free Software, with no licence fees and all source code available for you to hack.

As some have noted, except for the use of the Facebook name, there's very little Facebook can do to sue copycat websites, unless You make an exact Replica of the HTML or bitmaps, they don't have many chances of winning a trial in the U.S. on the grounds of user interface look and feel, at least after the landmark Lotus vs. Borland legal case(en.wikipedia.org).

So what are you waiting for? There is certainly room on the Net for a thousand more Facebook clones. Or is there? In any case, this scribbler hopes the open source project thrives and kills all the cheap for-profit knock-offs who put DooDoo in this GAME.

How to build a social network site ?? Has the cost of building a social network site droped ??

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