Cost of building a social network site drops to near zero

PLENTY of firms are trying to profit from the gold rush towards so-called social networking sites after the success -or at least popularity- of Facebook, Linkedin, Hi5, and other such sites. And the cost of entry for new players is getting lower all the time.

Facebook may be one of the fastest-growing social network sites, but its technology is far from unique. Besides the existing entrenched competitors, small software firms are also selling scripts that allow anyone to start a Facebook look-alike site for three-digit figures. Of course, those new sites do not have the third-party applications nor any significant number of users when they start up, but those also help dilute the novelty appeal of the concept. Consider webmail: at one point all webmails were the same, until Google came along and reinvented the concept with its GMail.

And now, even Open Source software is getting into the game of offering anyone the ability to create their own social network. All bad news for Facebook which will continue to see competing sites mushrooming. In short, its underlying technology is not unique and, being a web service in the "cloud", can be easily copied. Copycat sites are appearing all over the place and targeting different market niches, whereas Facebook positions itself as the "one size fits all" of social networks.

A firm from India sells a script to run your own "face book" site for £210. Now Open Source software is offering similar abilities to create social network sites.

For instance, there's a handful of popular Facebook clones in operation in China, and those have been in operation for a long time, even before Facebook landed with its own site. About six months ago there was a good comparison of existing Facebook clones published over here.

In Russia, Facebook had to face Vkontakte, the locally-developed, Russian language social network site when it decided to land in the country with a Russian-language Facebook last year. And in Germany there was StudiVZ, sued by Facebook as it claimed it was a "counterfeit product" due to the similar look and feel.

But while most of the high-end Facebook clones already in operation were likely developed in-house, last year we saw plenty of small outfits trying to profit from the social networking gold rush by selling turnkey solutions - scripts written in PHP or other server side languages - for around $500 or even less. These allow anyone with a hosting account or server to create his own basic Facebook copycat. Of course, without the complexity and array of features of the real one - much less the user base.

What shocked this scribbler however is the sheer number of people who continue trying to create their own social network web site from scratch by hiring freelance programmers, and hoping to hit gold as if there were not enough Hi5s, LinkedIns and Facebooks in the webosphere already - see here or here. Of course, the availability of lots of search engines didn't stop a pair of clever guys from creating Google. But we can't help but think there's a bubble of sorts in this social network sites craze.

The only apparent reasons to start coding a new Facebook clone site from scratch seem to be, (a) if you have revolutionary ideas for new features -in other words you want to create the Facebook killer that doesn't resemble any of the existing sites. Or (b), you want to target a special market niche which requires special needs. For the rest, the small shops offering ready-made turnkey solutions can be enough to have a Facebookalike site up and running in a matter of hours or days rather than months. Why would anyone want to run a social site, well, that's a different question. Unless of course you have a very specific market niche.

Some commercial FB clone offerings
One such piece of code that claims to offer a "face book clone" - notice the very wise wording and spacing :) - is dubbed Kootali and sold by "Agriya info way" a firm from Chennai, India. The firm is selling its server side application for $297, £210 or €232 and for that you get "99.9% source code", whatever that missing 0.1 per cent means.

Another company that has been offering for quite some time its own social networking software "like Facebook" calls it "SocialGroupie" and it sells for $490, £345 or €384.

The CMS approach
Others build a "facebook clone" on top of existing Content Management System (CMS) back end software, like the popular Drupal. One such scripts is dubbed "Kickwork", and is listed over here. Ebizon charges between $900 and $3000 per project for customization.

Open Source enters the picture
And as if all this wasn't enough, and the barrier of entry wasn't already low enough with £200 scripts from India, there's now Joomunity described as "a facebook clone for Joomla" in other words, a community site and social network built on top of the popular Joomla CMS.

Joomunity, of which version 1.1.0 beta3 has been released two weeks ago is GNU/GPL Free Software, with no licence fees and all source code available for you to hack. Find it over here.

As some have noted, except for the use of the Facebook name, there's very little Facebook can do to sue copycat sites, unless they make an exact copy of the HTML or bitmaps, you don't have many chances of winning a trial on the U.S. on the grounds of user interface look and feel, at least after the landmark Lotus vs. Borland legal case.

So what are you waiting for? There is certainly room on the Net for a thousand more Facebook clones. Or is there? In any case, this scribbler hopes the open source project thrives and kills all the cheap for-profit knock-offs.

Connecting the Social Graph: Member Overlap at OpenSocial and Facebook

OpenSocial is a Google-led initiative to get into social networking (in a bigger way than Orkut) and, purportedly, to create "open standards" so users can access their data on any social network. The project is still taking shape, but it looks like it will give users access to widgets across a bunch of social networks, at least as a first phase.

Looking at the OpenSocial coalition of social networks, some, like LinkedIn, clearly fall into the professional branches of the "social graph" or that virtual map of all our relationships. Other social networks, like Friendster are much more personal in nature.

Facebook, though not in OpenSocial, may be the only social network to have criss-crossed professional and personal boundaries, at least among internet professionals. Lastly, the family branch of the social graph, can be found on sites like Ancestry.com.

As developers think about connecting the disparate branches of the social graph, either through widget access, personal data portability or an aggregator for easy management, Compete asks, "How do the user communities of the social graph overlap today?"

This chart shows the members of any 2 social networks as a percentage of the members of the social network in the purple row. So, for instance, 20% of MySpace members are also Facebook members.

• Meanwhile, 64% of Facebook members also belong to MySpace. This asymmetry makes sense when you consider MySpace has nearly 3x the unique visitors of Facebook and a few years head start.
• Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster all share more than 49% of their members with MySpace.
• Plaxo, Salesforce and Viadeo share more members with LinkedIn (the largest professional social network by 4x) than with either MySpace or Facebook.
• LinkedIn shares 42% of its members with Facebook and 32% with MySpace.
• Ning, which lets users customize their own social networks, has greater overlap with both MySpace and Facebook than with LinkedIn.

We can see the social graph, as it is online today, consists of mainly personal relationships, though a large group of users belong exclusively to professional social networks and many belong to both. A collective solution to bringing the entire social graph online might do well to take a closer look at the particular needs of this early adoption crossover group.