Recently, I’ve created two social networks – both as experiments in creating them, and as opportunities to join communities of which I am very much a part of. The first is Fan made videos – I used to create a lot of Fan Made Videos for Youtube, for bands who didn’t have videos, or films who hadn’t had trailers released. I stopped making the videos for fear of being sued, as litigious as the record and movie companies are these days. But I still enjoy watching the videos, and decided to create www.fanmadevideos.com as a place for other creators and fans of fan created videos to gather.

The second network is closer to my heart at the present time - www.ReadNerd.com is a social community for readers and writer’s of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy fiction. I am a writer of genre fiction (see my personal/writing blog here), and of course I have been a lifelong fan. There are other good community sites out there for readers (GoodReadsis my favorite) and writers (WeBook is my favorite), but all of them are missing the community that I am most in tune with – that is, fans of real horror (not young adult or Twilight – I have nothing against the genre or the books, but I don’t read either), real science-fiction (space opera, hard sci-fi, and even the comedic sci-fi of Robert Asprin or the Adventures of Retief), and Fantasy. If you’re a fan of genre fiction, please feel free to visit ReadNerd.com – it’s a work in progress, so don’t expect it to be feature complete/defect-free, but poke around and meet everyone!

Keeping in mind that Twitter and Facebook are the default social networks. It wasn’t my intention to try and compete with either of those platforms, obviously, but I believe there is space for every niche on the Web, and every niche should have its own network that can talk to Twitter/Facebook, let users from either/both services loogin and/or post as wither their Twitter identity, their Facebook identity, or as a new user at the niche social network.

1) Choosing a platform:
After a month or two of research, I narrowed down my choices to a few options. Joomla, with social extensions, WordPress with the Buddypress plugin/platform, or Elgg, an open source software social network in a box. I know those aren’t the only players, but there were a couple of factors that caused me to narrow it down to these choices. Joomla has a large and taltented pool of contributors, and is written and extensible with PHP. However, the social extensions in Joomla tend to be a bit expensive. Eliminated – both BuddyPress and Elgg are free and open source.

Elgg is an open source, community driven platform for creating your own social network site. The installation to my hosting was simple, at least as simple and easy as the WordPress install. I really like Elgg, and set up a test install and played with it for a solid week. The plugin ecosystem seems promising on the surface, but it seems as though in the community there is a lot of stale plugins (haven’t been updated in a long time, no longer compatible with the Elgg core, which is version 1.7). This was the only factor that prevented me from using Elgg – other than WordPress’s track record and community.

WordPress, is, of course, by favorite blogging platform. As a CMS? It used to require some hacking around to get WordPress into a decent CMS platform – but I’m happy to say that WordPress MutliUser is now far and a way the best (heck, the only) choice for solid, mature, free, open source easy social network in a box. Boonex Dolphin, for example, is more feature rich, at least in the core, but it has a steep learning curve. If you’ve blogged over the past few years, it’s very likely you’ve used WordPress – and so has everyone else. SO that means a large and diverse group of developers and just as importantly, plugin developers, have been adding to the platform. It recently went to version 3.0, and should now be considered perhaps the premiere blogging/CMS platform on the web. BuddyPress is more than a simple plugin for WordPress – it extends WordPress to bake in social networking functionality. As soon as I installed a test version of BuddyPress, I knew this was the right way to go.

The Winner is: WordPress with BuddyPress!

In part 2, I’ll go into the initial steps I took to set up WordPress and Buddypress and turn it into a full-featured social network in about 20 minutes! Yes, it is that quick!