Social Networking Sites

hi all
I spoke at drupal camp india on building social networking sites with and around drupal. Basically I wanted to share my experiences good/painful with social networking sites with drupal as platform. Below is the link to presentation I gave, As mentioned this was more experience sharing than "Teaching" where I majorly discussed existing module stack available and issues with them (as SNS enablers) and where did I hit the wall and how did I resolve it.

Bloomstreet.net one of the biggest German Drupal sites and probably the biggest German social network built with Drupal was closed a few days ago.
Bloomstreet was certainly not shut down because it was built with Drupal, but, as was reported by German media, venture capitalist Bertelsmann was discontent with Bloomstreet's growth.

Hi,

I've just launched a new Drupal social network (http://drupalsn.com) and i'm now actively promoting the site, but i'm hoping to spark some debate as to how everyone out there promotes their social networking sites so we can share ideas and strategies and see which ones work best!

My personal view is social networks can be hard to promote, because you obviosuly want to drive traffic to your site but you also want sign ups. Does traffic automatically mean sign ups or do you need a more specific strategy?

www.babelup.com

BabelUp is a social network for social activism. That is, it's a fun community to hang out in with friends and discuss global issues. BabelUp hosts forums, user blogs, image galleries, real-time chatting, groups, calendars, and lots of other features you'd expect to find in a well-designed (hopefully) social network.

Yesterday was Facebook's f8 developers conference here in San Francisco. They presented some great information about the new look (wider canvas pages, wider profile boxes, new feed options) and also Facebook Connect which will change the way Drupal sites share information with Facebook. They held a hackathon and honored several of the projects Facebook's engineers considered the best. And Drupal for Facebook was a winner (specifically, of a Sony PS3)!

Speaking of conferences, I've proposed a session about Facebook App development at the upcoming DrupalCon. It needs votes to make it into the schedule, so if you will attend the DrupalCon, please take a moment to vote for that session.

I'd also like feedback, and more votes, for my grant proposal. This grant could help fund Drupal for Facebook, thereby making it easier to use and up-to-date with Facebook's latest features. If you don't know about the Knight Drupal Initiative, you really should participate. All the proposed grants need review from within the Drupal community before being considered by the Knight Foundation. And if you have ideas that need funding, you really should submit your own proposal.

Hi, I have been looking at social networking sites that use Drupal and have not seen anyone that exactly matches my requirements.

My site has to have the following requirements I have not seen in other drupal implementations:

1. The site has hard-coded groups that is assigned by the system administrator. Members can select to join one of these groups.
2. Members can create their own groups that they can manage and control.
3. Members can have their own blogs. Groups can have their own blogs.

Optional but extremely useful requirement:

I just wrote a new article called How I Survived a 2300% Traffic Increase With Drupal. It documents my experience with hitting the front page of Reddit, and some of the steps I took to make sure my site stayed online.

I also included some nice traffic graphs and statistics. If you ever wondered what kind of numbers to expect from a front-page link on a big social news site, be sure to check it out.

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John Forsythe

Hi Everyone.

I am trying to figure out the best way to market a General Social Networking Website.

Some ideas which come in my mind are

Put banners on your earlier established website
Advertising on other websites
Trying to market on other big social networks like Myspace, Bebo, Facebook by creating a few groups or other method (please add your ideas)
Create some applications for other social websites.
Offering something pretty unique that all users invite their friends also.
I guess it won't be easy to SEO a general social network