Technology Guides

Do you want to explore the possibility of running your own Facebook or LinkedIn because you are simply beyond the realms of everybody else? Well, there are options for you. The web has allowed you to be able to create your own free social network for anybody or a private network for you and your best friends. I personally set one up for a company I am part of, as I am the Vice-President of IT. We are a small company and just want something small, private, and most importantly, free, to conduct our daily business. With that being said, you can obviously guess my favourite pick of these sites to start your own social network just from the URL. It is a private network so you won’t be able to view everything but it’s located at http://jamarkham.ning.com.

Ning

This is my favourite of the 3 sites that I will describe to you. One of the reasons I love this site to build a social network is because of the drag-and-drop capabilities. Even once it is built, you are able to easily move different elements of your site to different parts of the page. Ning also has many different templates and styles to choose from, making personalization virtually endless.

Ning

The next step to me, is to open it to open-source programs like Wordpress and Blogger so other people can make their own templates and designs for others to easily download and upload to their own site. Elements you can include into your Ning social network are: chat, videos, photos, member view, forums, groups, and many more. Another plus of this program is you have control over your members if you are the creator of the social network. You can appoint group administrators and even ban members. Overall, this site will help you create a polished and professional site from scratch in less than 10 minutes as it did with me. 

KickApps

For people with a little dough to burn, this site will definitely be for you. One of the huge reasons many companies use this is because of the ability to fine tune a lot of the details. The Phoenix Suns use this service and they have a great website for their fans called Planet Orange. Because these organizations have money to spend, they can afford the developers to help build the website for them, but even the basic web developers can do it with some time with the help of the site’s advanced tool kit. The finished product is definitely worth it. 

Nexopia

Youth’s will love this version of a social network site builder because it is directed to youth. It provides users with the ability to create Facebook-like backgrounds, pages, and elements. The great thing about this program, is it’s easy to build the site. It is simple enough for somebody at any skill level. All you need to do is choose a bunch of different options like the design template, and then pick from your choice of two dozen modules that include feeds, photos, polls, and forums. 

Conclusion

I personally like Ning because it’s for someone who has some knowledge of websites but not enough to start from scratch and fork over money for a temporary social network. All three of these social network sites are great choices and you should be pleased with any one of them. KickApps does let you build one for free but there are limited options.

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