Hi All, I'm in the process of developing a Web Community website, similar to MySpace and Facebook, and I'm looking for input from anyone who can recommend a good source for Web Community software. Please let me know if you can recommend a resource, and please also include the reason(s) for your recommendation, e.g. reliability, features, ease of use, etc. Thanks in advance, Sam
Hi there Sam, Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I have looked high and low for community software and have come to the conclusion that the ready-made scripts are all pretty poorly designed and written. If I wanted to build a community, I would probably choose something like the hosted software of Ning or Kickapps. The downside of this approach, is that they own the data, so it is a poor idea if you want to build up your own site. I also came to the conclusion that building communities is very expensive and time-consuming with little hope for monetizing the results. I recently wrote an article on the subject: Can anyone make money from social networking? So, you can count on some pretty steep mountains to climb to come out of this with a successful community. Ones that are providing a good ROI are very rare. I hope you find this info useful. Regards, Rich
Take a look at www.barnraiser.org - I made my own "ning" style groups site and gave all our employees their own web site and OpenID using their software - saved us a fortune!