Social Networking website packages?

[nickbaer]

Has anyone bought a Social Networking website package?

Those that are MySpace or Facebook clones?

Not just Joomla or Drupal, but the ones that are a bit more developed as clones - with hosting packages.

I'm evaluating 2 right now.

[Bec]

which 2 ?

[Lee]

There are a bunch of Myspace clone scripts out there and quite honestly, they all suck.

You would be best going the custom route and putting in the features you need specifically, it really will save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

Regards,

Lee

[nickbaer]

I'm putting up a reunion website for the schools in my hometown.

I evaluated http://www.handshakesdemo.com and www.alstrahost.com/friends .

The deal breaker with Handshakes is that they wanted to charge me $300 to "customize" their code to ask women for their "maiden name"!!!!!!!!!!

How the #$%^&*( can you have a high school alumni site and not search for a woman by their maiden name!?!?!?!?!

Even at the level I am with PHP, I would have like to do it myself, but supposedly I will have it up in a few days - and not have to re-invent the wheel with registration and photo albums.

[HunkyLuke]

let us know how the software goes, I am keen on getting one of these online

[nickbaer]

I went with the friends package, because Friends pre-sales was more helpful on the "maiden name" matter than Handshakes. And Friends is a little cheaper - which wouldn't have mattered if the maiden name support had been reversed.

As it turned out, the same answer also solved my concern about other searchable fields like Military service... which was easy to add.

I paid $30 for them to set it up on my host. I went with their suggestion for a host, since they've been there done that with previous clients. I'm sure it could run on any host, but you might have to give them more time and info so they can set up the SQL on any other host.

Unlike hosts e.g. GoDaddy, this one is not a registrar and host, so there was a 12 hr confusion on my part waiting for the Domain to go live, when actually it never got registered. Even though they asked me what Domain I wanted, and they checked that it was available, they didn't do the next step of registering it! They have an unadvertised sister company that does that. So I did it on GoDaddy and set the NS back to the them.

Once they set it up, it basically worked out of the box. I will spend hours on design and changing wording of welcome pages and setting up groups, but it did work out of the box.

Its all php and html, as opposed to asp, so I can take it from there with my levels of image and verbiage customization.. I'm thinking that their built in banner ads service is not really what I want, so I can attend to that with my own php/sql that runs from my more familiar mySQL server. etc etc Ads is not an out of the box issue at all, and I can do what I need to be done.