7 Ways To Start Your Own Social Networking Site

The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.

Ning is the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create social experiences that inspire action. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Ning offers an easy-to-use service that enables people to create custom branded social networks. With more than 300,000 active Ning Networks created across politics, entertainment, small business, non-profits, education and more, millions of people every day are coming together across Ning to connect around the topics they are passionate about. Founders Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini created the company (formerly known as 24 Hour Laundry / 24H Laundry) in October 2004. Bianchini stepped down as CEO in March 2010 and was replaced by COO Jason Rosenthal. In May, the company announced it would focus its attention on paying Ning Networks and stop supporting free Ning Networks in July.

Their business model is based on delivering Google ads (their own ad platform in development) as well as selling premium services to individual Ning Networks, such as the ability to remove Ning’s ads and run their own, and a way to use a custom domain name.

GoingOn provides a fast and cost effective way to build vibrant online communities. Leveraging the best of today’s social web, GoingOn Community Platform enables academic institutions to deliver new, more engaging models of knowledge management and social collaboration across their campuses, and to their broad network of constituents. The results include increased student engagement, improved faculty product-ivity, enhanced online learning and broader marketing outreach.

GoingOn Community delivers a single platform solution for deploying an institution-wide network of user configured communities that transforms antiquated portals, static websites and listless online learning systems into a thriving social environment. It’s built on a modern open source foundation that is designed to allow non-technical users to quickly and easily deploy a variety of different community types without complexity. The result is a uniquely modern approach to building and managing social knowledge and to deploying a new generation of web infrastructure to support today’s and tomorrow’s social campus.

KickApps provides on-demand social media applications that enable web publishers and marketers to grow, engage, and monetize online audiences. Its SaaS platform is powered by the first Social Graph Engine for web publishers. The platform includes social networking, user-generated content, programmable video players, drag-and-drop widget building, WidgeAds and other applications that are tightly integrated with Robust Media Moderation, member management and reporting.

In March 2007 KickApps partnered with YouTube by providing KickApps’s affiliates with the ability to easily pull relevant and compelling video from the YouTube library into their own KickApps-powered networks through the YouTube API. KickApps also added features that allow its affiliates to easily publish video from their networks directly to their YouTube accounts.

CrowdVine provides social networks for conferences and other professional communities.

Conference attendees are looking for a tool to help them make contacts at the event. CrowdVine for Conferences is a hosted social network package that’s tailored specifically for conferences. Rather than being yet another place to manage your friends, it helps you organize a want-to-meet list, see which sessions your friends are going to, and when the conference is over, export your new contacts to your permanent social network (LinkedIn, Facebook, email).

Broadband Mechanics’ PeopleAggregator is an experiment in building social networks around open standards so that people can easily move between networks, whether or not those networks are run by the same owners or contain the same features. If the social networking world were run the way Broadband Mechanics’ CEO Marc Canter envisions, Facebook users would easily be able to carry their identity (including all the information they owned on Facebook) over to MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. Then any changes to their identities on those networks could be brought back over to Facebook.

As a model for this sort of interoperability, PeopleAggregator (which comes in both hosted and downloadable versions) implements the OpenID authentication system and strives to support all open standard identity schemes. Broadband Mechanics also provides an API that is meant to enable the import and export of data to or from a PeopleAggregator network. As a long run strategy, the company entreats web service providers to embrace open standards that facilitate interfacing between social networks and non-social networks such as Google Calendar, YouTube, and Yahoo Messanger.

ME.COM runs on top of software called SNAPP, is the MySpace of white label social networking platforms (and I mean that derogatorily). The idea, as with Ning, is to set up a network in a minimal number of steps. However, each of Me.com’s themes is an eyesore and, worse, the organization of elements throughout the default network is horrible. If you like this MySpace approach to user interface design, then you’ll be right at home. I, for one, get a headache just looking at the thing.

Style considerations aside, Me.com provides an abundance of features, although many of them are poorly implemented. The audio and video sections, for example, don’t support file uploads; you actually have to record the media directly into the browser using a webcam or similar device.

Groupsite.com is a platform that empowers the creation of social websites called Groupsites. Groupsites are collaboration communities that enable groups to communicate, share and network to make things happen. They do this by combining the most useful (but not all) features of online groups and listservs (like Yahoo! Groups), collaboration software (like Sharepoint) and Social Networks (like Facebook and Linkedin).

We call this “social collaboration.”

We believe groups provide the context for making things happen. Most “social networks” start with you as the center of the world and your “page” as the main focus. You then “friend” or link to others forming a network around you. Groupsites are group-centric: the group is the center of everything. Groupsites are group-agnostic: they can be used by professional or social groups, large or small groups, and private or public groups.