How do you create a social networking site?

[wittylaborer716]

Like for example if i wanted to make a site like myspace or facebook...How would start to do that? and how much would it cost me??

[Stryder]

You'd start by getting a gazillion dollars together and then you could pay the professional web designers, programmers, marketers, business analysts, hosting services, hardware technicians etc required to run a site like that.

Or you could learn html, php and maybe some other web programming skills and and try to throw one together and try to sell it to a venture capitalist but I don't like your chances.

[Cory]

http://www.best-php-scripts.com/social_networking.htm

Also go learn php

php.net

[what?]

start learning databases

[Sean M]

It will cost you a few hundred dollars in programming books plus the cost you will need to pay a host to put your site up.

Unfortunately if you want to program your own site it requires a lot of knowledge of html, databases and some type of middleware like ASP.NET, JSP, or PHP. You might even need to know a programming language like C#, VB.NET, or Java.

It will take a LOT of work to do it yourself. But you can probably find some software that will take care of a lot of the programming aspects for you.

By the way, do you know this is one of the most commonly asked questions on this forum?

[Sean M]

You can do it for free at http://www.ning.com
Getting the traffic is the hard part.

[sewrobb]

Unless you happen to have a spare £10,000,000 sitting in your back pocket as loose change I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Something like that is not a wake up in the morning idea and have it up and running by tea time.

It ain't just going to happen and to be honest I really think you have absolutely no idea what it involves setting it up and making it pay.

[terlan d]

The costs are goig to vary from very little if you happen to be a professional coder / developer / marketing guru / graphic artist / seo specialist all rolled into one and have a free year to mess about with it to sever hundred thousand $ if you hire a squad of people to launch it for you. then you need it to make some money.

However if you are just wanting to play about with the idea try some of the free scrip websites, learn a bit about how to setup, install and configure the script pop it up and invite all your friends to come and use it. Hell they might tell their friends and so on and so on and so on..
Then you make a few bucks from the ads from google adsense cut in a few people to help you add mroe features spend a bit getting it looking better, a few more people tell their friends about it and before you know it you've sunk a year of your time into something thats barely breaking even, is causing you to loose your hair and you can get for free by typing www. myspace into a browser.

Even if you had an unlimited supply of cash myspace, bebo, facebook are there already. Bringing a new social networking site to the web will be like pouring a cup of water into the ocean, it'll be lost among the million other wannabe clones that are trying to jump on the bandwagon. Your best bet is to turn your time and money to figuring out what the next internet trend will be and getting there first.