A social network is a social structure made of generally individuals or organizations. That is tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade. Social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail, instant messaging services, audio/video conferencing.
Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. One popular use for this new technology is social networking between businesses. Companies have found that social networking sites such as face book and twitter are great ways to build their brand image.
Social software allows users to interact and share data. The tools used in social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Different types of social sites use different tools to achieve there targets. We can name some of these tools as below:
- Instant Messaging
- Internet forums
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Collaborative real-time editor
- Prediction markets
- Social network services
- Social network search engines
- Deliberative social networks
- Commercial social networks
- Social guides
- Social bookmarking
- Social cataloging
- Social libraries
- Social online storage
- Virtual worlds
- Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)
- Non-game worlds
- Economies
To compensate increasing demands of the usage of social networking sites open source communities have extended their helping hand and developed and still developing new technological solutions and offer betterment for users by and large. Let us see some pioneer open source solutions or Content Management System most practices in the market.
- Liferay:
License: MIT
Programming Language: Java, PHP, Ruby
Main advantages: collaboration, calendars, internationalization, designs.
Disadvantages: More closely tied to a commercial outlook / corporate structure than most Open Source projects.
Outlook: Not as well known or implemented as some of the other CMS platforms, but nice design & features to set your sites apart from the crowd.
Website: http://www.liferay.com/
- Dolphin:
Boonex Dolphin is popular among web designers who want the latest in social networking, with an industry standard look and all of the features of the popular online communities out of the box.
License: Creative Commons
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Plug-n-Play user community with all the bells & whistles.
Disadvantages: not really Open Source, must pay to remove ads, requires specific hosting requirements, difficult to install, buggy.
Outlook: Look for Dolphin to continue to be a popular choice for social networking, though its “cookie cutter” design runs the risk of becoming stale with too many sites implementing the same design.
Website: http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/
- Elgg:
Elgg often describes as a “learning landscape”. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well.
License: GNU
Programming Language: Elgg is built on LAMP and is open source
Main advantages: The software has its own plug-in architecture, and supports a number of open standards including RSS (which is used throughout Elgg), LDAP for authentication (soon to support OpenID), FOAF, and XML-RPC for integration with most third-party blogging clients.
Disadvantages: must pay for plug-ins. The biggest complaint has been around privacy settings and feeds for the blogs.
Outlook: really robust system.
Website: http://elgg.org/index.php
- Phpizabi:
Programming Language: PHP backend powered by MySQl.
Main advantages: It has the best out of the box look and feel of all the social networking scripts and easy to do some modifications with it. The script developed in modular structure so that new features can be added as modules to the existing core. Disadvantages: The trouble is, the more users you have, the slower it will get, because the server is spending all its time serializing and un-serializing information then presenting it to the user.
Outlook: It is a theme based template and various modules with lot up features are and skins are available.
Website: http://www.phpizabi.net
- TYPO3:
One of the most complex and professional CMS platforms out of the box, TYPO3 is popular for business websites, especially with European companies.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: design, extensions, customizations, flexibility, professionalism.
Disadvantages: too difficult to learn for most, too many proprietary conventions.
Outlook: Strong CMS for web development, sure to continue with a core of specialized developers and corporate clients, but loosing support and market share to other platforms.
Website: http://www.typo3.com/
- Media Wiki:
Media Wiki invented a whole new way of working on the web, and is a CMS for collective authoring of documents, used to power the one of the largest and most popular sites on the internet, Wikipedia.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: If you need a wiki, it is the best.
Disadvantages: Does not include many other functions / extensions of other CMS platforms, doesn’t theme well, most sites look the same.
Outlook: Follows the model to success of doing one thing extremely well, has the support of the Wikipedia Foundation, very popular authoring model.
Website: http://www.mediawiki.org/
- Movable Type:
Movable Type is the main challenger to WordPress for a personal blog platform, and supports multiple users, Themes, and Tags.
License: GNU
Programming Language: Perl
Main advantages: Blogs
Disadvantages: Too closely tied to commercial products and services compared to most Open Source communities, Perl.
Outlook: Look for MT to fall off the list as other of the blogging platforms below increase in popularity, but sustain development as PR for the company’s commercial offerings.
Website: http://movabletype.org/
- Drupal:
Drupal gets the top nod because of its ease of use, vast number of modules, great user, developer, and support community.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: core CMS, Views, CCK, Organic Groups, & huge library of contributed modules.
Disadvantages: complex, needs more top quality themes, frequent security upgrades.
Outlook: Huge potential to continue growth and expansion on this platform over time.
Website: http://www.drupal.org/
- WordPress:
WordPress is a simple and elegant CMS, perfect for single user blogs, with a large number of themes and modules available online.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Easiest CMS to use, customize, and extend.
Disadvantages: Lacks many of the social networking functions, ecommerce, forums, wikis, etc. used on more expansive sites.
Outlook: Best for personal publishing, huge user community, will continue to be the preferred choice of bloggers for years.
Website: http://www.wordpress.org/
- Joomla:
Joomla has one of the largest user communities of any CMS, everything you need and more to develop social networks, ecommerce, & archive sites.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Professional standards, internationalization, customization.
Disadvantages: too many commercial products for Open Source development, difficult to learn.
Outlook: Strong challenger for the top CMS spot, commercialization of extensions should continue to provide many income opportunities for 3rd party developers.
Website: http://www.joomla.org/
- Moodle:
Moodle is one of the most unique CMS platforms on this list, designed specifically for Course Management and Education, and used for online learning platforms.
License: GNU
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Huge user and development community, online education, no real competitors or similar products, extremely powerful.
Disadvantages: not really applicable for most web design purposes.
Outlook: Look for this “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment” to continue to be the standard online operating system for education and spawn many interesting mashups with other CMS platforms as well as many more modules & extensions.
Website: http://www.moodle.org/
- Pligg:
Pligg is a Digg clone that provides social bookmarking functionality for websites, allowing users to post links, vote them up or down, and leave comments.
License: GPL
Programming Language: PHP
Main advantages: Best for Social Bookmarking, can be themed and extended to build top quality sites like Mixx, Redditt, Del.icio.us, etc.
Disadvantages: difficult to install, mod rewrite problems, poor support on community boards, questionable Open Source future.
Outlook: With the 1.0 release of Pligg upcoming within a couple of months, look for a big surge of use back to this platform but watch out for increased commercialization.
Website: http://www.pligg.com/
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