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Best social network platform?

Plenty out there, but does anyone have any experience?

AnonyMouse

4:26 pm on May 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I've been boning up on social networking software, and would love to hear feedback from anyone who has genuine experience of using them.

From what I've seen, I'd say the list of contenders includes:

- Ning, a hosted solution
- PeopleAggregator, a hosted or downloaded open-source solution
- ELGG, downloaded solution
- GoingOn, a hosted solution
- Altrasoft's E-Friends, a licensed solution
- Drupal, a super-comprehensive solution

Ning appears to be a good solution for a hobby site, but I have issues with the ownership of the member's details. GoingOn appears similar to NING but with no option to use your own domain. ELGG doesn't light my fire.

E-Friends has an awesome feature list, but suffers some bad press for it's quality. Drupal seems like using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut, though maybe that's just me.

Which leads me to my favorite runner, PeopleAggregator (possibly the least sexy name of all time). On their site itself, the communities seem pretty vacant, which doesn't give a good image. But I like their open-source, open-identity ideals.

The type of project I have in mind is a cross between MySpace and Digg, a city-focused community where people communicate (forums, blogs, chat) but also vote down/up stories.

Please let me know of your experiences with any of the above!

AnonyMouse

7:44 pm on May 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Actually, having noted that elgg has multi-lingual support and a load of plugins being developed for it, I'm promoting it to second-runner. Once again, anyone here had any experience with any of these software solutions?

utah

10:40 pm on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I'm currently running Elgg right now. It's fairly nice for the networking part of the site. But rather a pain to add lots of content pages to it. There are people running Drupal and Elgg together with good results, I'm going to be trying that this weekend and see what I can get.

This is the only one I've installed and tried out. If you go with Elgg I'd suggest you also be good with php to add little things that you may want or to change minor things.

PeopleAggregator would have been my choice but requires PHP 5.0 to install and my host wouldn't upgrade. So now I'm running Elgg .8rc2 with heavy self modifications.

utah

10:42 pm on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Oh and as far as your voting thing...

Elgg does not have this with it's current version but it seems that there will be a plugin to allow this shortly. The framework is there already in the databases but just no software yet.

AnonyMouse

7:51 am on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Thanks for the feedback! I'm having all sorts of problems installing Elgg, and that's with being a PHP hack. I've now got php5 running, so I'm going to try PeepAgg and see how easily that installs.

utah

1:26 am on May 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

yeah it took me a good 10 hours to install... but after that now I can install it like a whiz lol.

Let me know how the PeopleArg goes, I really do like that install and would love to hear feedback on it to see if it's worth looking for a php5 server.

If you ever go to try Elgg again, hit up Elgg.org and join that site. They have very active forums for helping people install and correct errors.