With all this talk of social networks, and Web 2.0, what if you want to build your own social network? With the help of a few different free tools on the internet, you can do so. The main application reviewed in this post is will be Elgg.

What is Elgg?

Elgg is an open source social networking application. You can use it to build your own social network. It’s totally free to use (open source). You can check it out here.

This post won’t cover the installation of Elgg. That will be covered in a future post (please check back!) Instead, this post will cover concepts in building a social network. It takes a lot to build your own social network.

How to build your own social network

1. You want to be unique. You won’t get anywhere if you aren’t. You need to give people a reason to use your social network other than one of the thousands of other social networks available. You can use Elgg as a start, but you should build upon it. It takes a lot of programming skill to be able to do this, so you might want to consider hiring a programmer. Or, if you don’t have the programming skill or the money to pay for programming, you might want to consider not starting a social network.
2. You want to be among your users. Be social on your social networkThis is one way to increase your success in Web 2.0: make friends with your users. There are many reasons why you might want to do this. First, it will give a warmer, more personal, feeling to your website. Talking to the owner of a website can make users feel at home at the website, especially if it is a close-knit network. Second, your users probably have a lot to say. Listen to them. Users can tell you how to improve your social network greatly and increase the usage of it.

This is just a little bit on how to build your own social network. We will get into the technical aspects of creating a social network (using Elgg) later.