preamble
Nowadays social networks on Internet take a lot of popularity. Your neighbor is probably already has social network about home shopping or nuclear reactors.
It is no wonder that more possibilities appear to create fast and easily your social network like:
Ning [http://www.ning.com/], KickApps[http://www.kickapps.com/], CrowdVine[http://www.crowdvine.com/], GoingOn[http://www.goingon.com/], ONEsite [http://www.onesite.com/], etc..
Our company had a chance to estimate some of them.
As most advanced and popular (> 230.000 networks) platform I can name: Ning.
Ning platform
After rapid registration process you get social full-featured network: instant messaging, blogs, music, video, photos, and so on..
One feature is a possibility is to change a number of parameters from administrator panel. That gives opportunity without any special software development education create and maintain social network.
Another feature is a possibility for software developers to create additional widgets, change behavior of system, and query and modify data thru RESTful API [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restful]. At this moment for widgets development only php is supported but Ning developers promise support for all popular languages.
Look on this “hello world” application to understand how you can drive it: [http://developer.ning.com/tutorials/Hello_World]
Extensions development for Ning platform looks like development for CMS systems [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system] and based on MVC paradigm [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller].
As unusual approach I can note using of Ning content store[http://developer.ning.com/wiki/The_Ning_Content_Store:_A_Primer]. It is non relative database that looks like ORM systems[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping]. I think that using of it is a disputable idea but for novice developers it is easy to understand it.
At the end I want to note main advantages and disadvantages of Ning plarform:
Advantages:
1.Simple an rapid creation of social networks;
2.Free basic access to the system(full abilities but you can’t turn off ads);
3.Big possibilities for modernization and relatively simple API for developers;
4.Quite good documentation;
Disadvantages:
1.Closed platform: we can’t deploy it at any place, we can’t look to source code when we have lack of documentation, we can’t redesign it, it prevent from simultaneous work of developers
2.Commercial platform: if you want to use your own domain name, or remove ads from Ning you should pay;
3.Database approach to store and handle data in DB.;
Conclusion:
This system is a wonderful start for new social networks, or old social networks without big amount of specific functionality.
ONE IMPORTANT note:
we faced disgustful relations of Ning to customers:
making some internal procedures they revoke access to source code from all user, and we lost many time waiting for an access when we have responsibilities against our customers to develop project by some fixed date. Closed platform is an evil !!
