As a fun project I wanted to build a social networking site for internal use inside our company. Most of the public networks are blocked by the proxy so i can't use the public api of facebook or other networking sites. I would like to hear from people who have built such sites before.
Thanks Bharani
What are you thinking of? Simple forum Detailed info about persons like facebook Both of these?
Can you give us more information what you want to see in order to achieve social networking (which is a big word)
It's quite a complex issue and your question isn't very precise. What would you like to know more specifically?
Social networking is a very broad term and includes many features as you see in facebook, orkut etc.
If you are simply looking for discussion, events, profiles kind of networking then there are lot of free software available which you can install to get going. For example, Eblah, Snitz, etc.
YaBB is an open source software written in Java so you can build more functionalities if you like.
I tried with phpBB before but that didn't attract too much traffic. So i am thinking that i should build one that has more "social" features like profiles , tagging , a good text search interface. I work for a software company - a lot of cool developers are around but there is no one place to share all the knowledge.
lovd by less - ruby on rails, open source, social networking platform
I just got done writing my book ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking in which I detail step by step how to go about building (technically) a social networking site. In it I cover the ideas of stickiness and community, contrast some of the popular sites, go over some lesser known sites, and then dig into the details of each feature that most of the common community sites have (friends, messaging, tagging, blogging, articles, profiles, accounts, security, navigation, etc.). Take a look at the book on amazon!
Check out Atlassian Confluence (http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/).
It is used by a lot of companies internally, and something which is also worthy of putting on your CV for your professional/career development.