Social networks are no longer the playgrounds of the young and chatty. Businesses and business people are using sites like Facebook and Myspace to further their brand presence and connect with their customers.
If you’re an avid Facebook user, check out a handy little app called Myphone+. It lets you import your Facebook friends (and their profile information) into your iPhone contact list. So instead of viewing a simple roster of names, you can access contacts by their Facebook profile images. With a single tap, you can dial the contact or hold your finger over the image and access their Facebook profile, photo albums, and wall.
When you first fire up Myphone+, the application matches contacts between the two and makes suggestions if a perfect match cannot be made. The system default is to keep your contact’s info unless you choose to override it, so no worries about lost phone numbers or emails. Subsequent syncs, which can be done with a single tap, will update the contact with any Facebook profile changes – like a new image or wall comments.
Myphone+ costs $2.99 – a small price to pay to bring your Facebook friends on board. However, the real value with an application like this is opening up another communication channel with your customers and brand followers – people who may not be in your traditional address book.
Unfortunately, the Apple iPhone developer program restricts certain features and functionality (we're sure for our own good), so MyPhone+ does not offer call logs and voicemails as part of the application - something that may hold it back from becoming your default contact list.
Are Facebook profiles the new business cards? We've reported on several integrations, where the common theme is taking your Facebook identity with you as you use other sites and platforms. Facebook Connect and FaceConnector (formerly FaceForce, Facebook/Salesforce mash-up) are a few examples.
If you’re looking to add some social elements to your site, you have quite a few options at your disposal (see A December social about being social). Of course, we’re partial to open source tools and applications. The price is always right (i.e. free) and the robust development community keeps the upgrades coming.
Our latest contender is Tog. Tog is a Ruby on Rails-based social platform that provides the basic building blocks of a social network, as well as an extensive library of add-on components. Translation? You can create and customize your community to spec – or add social functionality to an existing Ruby application – either way, it’s deliciously easy. Most solutions force you to spend your time and your budget reworking the core product. Tog gives you the features you want and ease of implementation that comes with Rails, including:
profiles
open/private groups
abuse report
tag clouds
ratings
internal messaging
blogs
photos
CMS
news
Q&A
You may recall a similar Ruby product called Community Engine. While we don’t play favorites, Community Engine is more of an out-of-the-box solution. If you’re looking for a basic community application, Community Engine is your guy. But, if you want something you can gear to your specific needs or want to create a niche community, we recommend Tog.
Leery of getting what you paid for? There are other benefits to going the open source route. With products like Tog and Community Engine, the accompanying open source community manages product upgrades and the introduction of new functionality, so maintenance costs tend to be low.
Chances are, you don't know Ruby on Rails from Adam, but you're probably using a Ruby application (Basecamp and Twitter, to name a few).
If you are looking to create a social network, there are a lot of ways to skin that proverbial cat. One option is to add social functionality to an open source content management system.
An interesting example is JomSocial. JomSocial is an extension for the popular open source Content Management System, Joomla!. It gives Joomla! users ready-made templates for creating online communities. It’s designed to eliminate all the piecemeal development tasks required to build a social network on Joomla!. With JomSocial, you get the following functionality standard:
Friending & Following
Private Messaging
Special Interest Groups
Activity Streams
Photo Albums with Photo Wall (commenting)
And as an added bonus, Twitter Posts
Plus, the templates are fully customizable and as a Joomla! user, you have access to the entire development community for support.
We recently held a local Meetup and published a note about the Top 10 Social Networking Platforms. We don’t have a time machine, but we do have the ability to add amend our original list, and JomSocial is a welcome addition.
JomSocial was created by Azrul, the same company behind successful Joomla! extensions, JomComment and My Blog.
CMS's like Joomla! have an infinite number of uses, thanks to a healthy open source community and a library of extensions. Joomla! can be used for e-commerce, corporate web sites and portals (both intranet and extranet), online publications, community-based sites, and a combination of all of the above.
Last night we had a great get together as part of our Atlanta Digital Marketing Meetup. However, of course, not all of our friends and fellow demented digital marketers live in Atlanta. So, we wanted to make sure that we shared what we discussed.
These days, so many companies are trying to figure out how to use social networking tools to do everything from target new prospects to conduct the equivalent of an ongoing panel of their best customers. Also, importantly, there are new tools emerging that put social networking and social media features within reach of just about anyone who can drag a mouse.
That said, here’s a list of social networks that you might want to consider. While most are indeed open source, we sort of cheated on this list and added a few other ones that strictly speaking are commercial, but have low cost or no cost options. Sometimes they present a better option – it just depends.
In other words, what is the top of the list for you might not be top of the list for the next guy. For that reason, while these represent the Top 10, in our humble and occasionally fishy opinion, we’ve not added specific numbers (and might try to sneak in no. 11 without you knowing).
In any instance, if you’re looking to build a social network, integrate a social network into your existing site, or maybe just get a little bit of social networking mojo, give this list a look.
LovdbyLess
LovdbyLess is a free and fully customizable social networking platform, built using Ruby on Rails. Lovd developers have offered their code to anyone with an itch to socialize and the server space to host it.
It comes with many of the same features and functionalities of Myspace and Facebook, such as:
blogs with comment capabilities
photo galleries with captions
profile bio and information
the ability to follow a user or “friend” them
site search for friends
user-to-user messaging
profile comments
user dashboard (recent activity feed)
emailed activity
flickr integration
youtube integration
Community Engine
CommunityEngine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.
Features
Authentication (sign up, log in)
User profiles
User search
Blogs with tagging, categories and rich text editing
Photo uploading and tagging
“Clippings” – visual bookmarks
Commenting and comment notification by e-mail (Blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings can be commented)
Forums
Friendships and activity feeds
Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
And more!
SocialEngine
SocialEngine is a PHP-based social network platform that lets you create a social network on your website. Right out of the box, your social network will offer nearly all of the features found on today’s wildly popular social networks.
Other social network apps overwhelm your users with superfluous features. History shows that the simpler, user-friendlier social networks are more likely to succeed. SocialEngine allows you to buy features “à la carte.” This means that if your unique idea includes specific features like blogs or photo albums, you can build them yourself or buy them from SocialEngine for a small fee.
Features:
Extensive user profile options
Search engine friendly URLS, template engine and support
Anti-spam features
Photo albums
Blogs
Groups
Classifieds
Events
Chat
Private Messages
Insoshi
While it’s not for the non-technical, Insoshi can let you create your own social network for a very low price – zero. All you need to do is download and configure the software, then customize it to work for your customers. If you want to see what it looks like, you can just sign up and play around to get a good idea.
The current version of Insoshi has the following features:
Activity feed
Personal profiles with photo upload and comment walls
Internal messaging system with read/replied/trashed messages
Contacts list
Blogs with comments
Discussion forum
Search for profiles, forums, and blogs
Admin panel with site preferences
Option for email verification and activity notifications
Elgg
Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.
Elgg is open source and runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL. It is compatible with any server environment that can run the Apache web server.
OpenID, OpenSocial, OAuth for integration with other web services
Open Data Definition and an increasing number of data portability formats for import / export
An extensible RESTful API, with results in JSON, serialised PHP or XML
AJAX through jQuery and user-definable callbacks
Easy extension for use with caching systems such as memcached, for increased system performance
Drupal + community modules
Drupal is a free, open-source software package that allows users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. There are already tens of thousands of sites powered by Drupal.
While not a social network specific platform, between the built-in functionality and an endless list of add-on modules, Drupal could be the perfect fit. If there’s a feature you need, someone has probably already developed a module to do it. But if not, there’s an enormous community of developers who support Drupal and you can write custom modules to share with them.
Joomla + Community Builder extension
The Community Builder suite extends the Joomla! and Mambo website user management systems and allows further management of those users.
Key features include:
extra fields in profile
enhanced registration workflows
user lists
connection paths between users
admin defined tabs and user profiles
image upload
front-end workflow management
integration with other components like PMS
Newsletter
Forum
Galleries
Use of multiple database connections for scalability
Search
Multiple network structures and full customizability
KickApps
Kickapps is a community-building platform – something of a private label social network that you can embed in your site with a modicum of effort. You may even have already seen it if you’ve visited or used community features on ABC Family, the DIY Network, or the Phoenix Suns. If you want to create your own brand’s Facebook, here’s one way to do it.
Community-Facing Features
My Home
Media Sharing and Mobile Uploading
Profile Pages
Widgets
Messaging
Friending and Groups
Blogs and Podcasts
Message Boards
Management Features
The KickApps Affiliate Center
Industry’s First Self-Service Widget Builder
Media Management
Member Management
Advertising Inventory Control
Detailed Reporting
Content Management System (CMS) Compatible
Ning
Ning offers the latest social networking features, all infinitely customizable to meet your unique needs. As a platform, you don’t have to appeal to Ning for the features you want. If you have the time and the inclination, you can build them yourself. It’s the software equivalent of Home Depot. Unlike other services that offer a “one-size-fits-all” offering, your social network on Ning runs on a programmable platform.
Fully customize the look of your network with themes and CSS
Insert widgets from other websites or create your own
Fully customizable profile
Schedule events, invite network members, and keep track of who’s attending
Create groups inside your social network around hobbies, interests, affinities, geographical locations and more
Real-time Activity Stream – Keep up with the members of your social network
Discussion Forum – Start a discussion on any topic and watch your members respond with posts, photos and attachments
Upload original footage or share videos from popular video services
Post photos and organize them into albums, galleries and slideshows
Create a network badge that your members can display with pride on their blog or website
Members can share photos, videos and music from your social network on their Facebook profiles
Ning offers some premium services as well, such as removing certain promotional links or ads, expanding your storage, or using a domain name that you own.
Google Friend Connect
Google Friend Connect is a new offering from Google that allows you to add social networking features to your site by simply copy and pasting gadget code from Google. The best part is, anyone with a Google, Yahoo, or OpenID account can join with only one click
Just copy and go
Choose the apps you want from a gallery of gadgets created by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. You can get gadgets for photo sharing, concert listings and games, with many more to come.
Copy the snippets of code for the gadgets you’ve chosen.
Paste the snippets where you want them to live on your site and just like that, they’ll be up and running.
With Google Friend Connect, visitors to your site or blog can:
Sign in with their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account.
Interact with other visitors by making friends, sharing media, posting comments, playing games, and more.
Invite friends from other social networks and contact lists to join your site or blog.
Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect is a new arm of the popular social networking platform, which gives users the ability to take their Facebook identity and friends with them as they explore outside sites and applications. Third-party sites need to adopt a portion of the Facebook API to enable Facebook Connect features.
For Third-party sites, Facebook Connect:
Provides trusted user authentication
Real Identities – Users bring their real names and information to your site, no pseudonyms or spammers
Social Distribution – Users can share and distribute their web activities with friends, putting your site, application, or content in front of new users.
With Facebook Connect, users can:
Login to your site with their Facebook username and password
Bring their Facebook information with them – username, friends, privacy settings, profile, images, groups, etc
Participate in activities on your site – like commenting or writing a review – then share these site activities with their Facebook friends (or publish activities under their feed)
Here’s a PDF version of our presentation, courtesy of our friends at DocStoc:
Looking to dip your toe into social networking but not ready to jump in with an entirely new site or big redesign?
Consider using a tool like Google Friend Connect (similar to Facebook Connect as we discussed in Everybody knows your name). This offering from Google makes it easy to integrate social features into your site using specific gadgets (the Google term for widgets).
Current gadgets include a members gadget, which lets you invite friends from social networks or contacts lists (so far, a meager list of Google Talk, Orkut, & LinkedIn) to visit and participate in site activities. There is also a wall gadget for discussions and a rate-and-review gadget. Friend Connect is extremely easy to integrate with your website or blog. There is no need to hire a developer or write additional code. After uploading some simple HTML files to your site, choose the gadget you want, then cut and paste the corresponding code into the body of your site. Last, but not least, Friend Connect lets you utilize your existing login information for Google, Yahoo, AOL, & Microsoft – not as meaty as your Facebook profile but still an excellent feature when you consider just about everyone has an email account with the Big 4.
The backbone of Google's Friend Connect is OpenID, a tool for eliminating multiple usernames across sites and the love child of the open source community. Surprisingly, you may already have an OpenID account if you use WordPress, Blogger, Flickr, and many other popular sites.
It's interesting to note that Facebook was an original partner of Google Friend Connect, but they pulled their support and participation from the project over user privacy issues. Last year, Facebook was lampooned for the inherent privacy issues with own Facebook Beacon platform, which may explain their trepidation.
Social networks are no longer the playgrounds of the young and chatty. Businesses and business people are using sites like Facebook and Myspace to further their brand presence and connect with their customers.
If you’re an avid Facebook user, check out a handy little app called Myphone+. It lets you import your Facebook friends (and their profile information) into your iPhone contact list. So instead of viewing a simple roster of names, you can access contacts by their Facebook profile images. With a single tap, you can dial the contact or hold your finger over the image and access their Facebook profile, photo albums, and wall.
