TechRaga

There are several ways to create your own social networking site like Orkut, Facebook or MySpace. I am listing few ways here.

• Ning : Ning lets you create your own social networking site. The basic service is free and has certain limitations regarding bandwidth etc. Yet, the service is superb!

You don’t need to have any technical knowledge. By default you will have a subdomain for your site, but you can upgrade to the paid service which lets you to have your own domain name for your site.

• PHPizabi : PHPizabi is a feature rich social networking platform that integrates everything you need to jumpstart your community, dating site, or social networking portal right out of the box. It is an open source project like WordPress. You can download it from here.  Thanks Prateek for the tip.
• Boonex Dolphin : Boonex’s Dolphin is another very smart script for creating community websites. It is again OpenSource and comes free with the condition BoonEx logo and links must be displayed on your site. It is very easy to handle and customize settings and options.
• phpBB : phpBB is very popular project and it best for creating forum based social networking sites. Many popular forums use this script. phpBB is released under the GNU General Public License, you may make changes to the code without first having to obtain permission from the phpBB Group.
• BuddyPress : A yet to be discovered social networking script based on WordPress  by Automattic – the creators of WordPress.  You can see the demo of BuddyPress at http://testbp.org/.

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

Why should you start your own social networking site?

It is a perfect idea to start your own social networking site rather than using existing tools. If you are not willing to start a site, you can try starting a Google Group, Orkut community or a Facebook group. But, always remember that you are not the  master of  site then.

I would like to mention about the famous Pink Chaddi campaign. Their group was deleted by facebook because facebook guys found it to be  a source of abuse!! Read more about this.

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6. Orkut.co.in – Indian Orkut Site
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8. Facebook.com Banned In Pakistan