Elgg - Build Your Own Social Network

By Author: David Tanguay
Total Articles: 78
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Social networking, wikis and blogs are the way most people gather information and interact online. In 2004, Elgg was started to offer a powerful and elegant solution to creating your own interactive online social network. Whether you want to bring professionals together for selective social networking or you feel like starting a site for your book club, Elgg makes it easy.

Social networking is a powerful way to bring people together. From starting a community organization to getting your business well-known, social networking makes it happen. Professionals often have little time to gather for conversation. Online social networking in an exclusive community promotes a meaningful exchange of ideas. Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant business administration professor at Harvard Business School, stated, Professionals are fairly protective about their social networks which they spend their whole lives to build.

From open networks to private groups, Elgg is an efficient way to build the social network you want. Profile fields can changed or extended by the site administrator. A member's profile provides an overview ...
... about them from both internal and external sources.

The Elgg comprehensive activity stream keeps users updated. Their own actions and the actions of their friends across the site appear in the activity stream. Users can choose to get notifications about friends' activity. Notifications are sent by a variety of methods including internal messaging and email.

The Elgg blogging tool makes it a breezes to share posts, pictures and videos with the social networking community. The drafting feature allows users to go back and edit the post until they get it right. The media embed feature makes sharing even easier.

The Elgg package brings microblogging to the forefront with the wire, which is much like having your own personal Twitter service. Users post to the wire via the site and SMS. Wire posts can be pushed out to Twitter to keep everyone within a business or organizations up-to-date wherever they are.

Another user-friends Elgg feature is the ability to create groups. Groups can be created for anyone to join or that require membership approval. Groups encourage meaningful collaboration and exchange of ideas. From working on a business project as a group to sharing recipes, groups make relevant communication possible. Site administrators can create site-wide categories for better organization.

Users set their own levels of sharing and privacy. Content can be restricted to be read by those members they mark as friends so nobody else has access. A user-defined default setting makes it easy to apply a set standard to all content. On the other hand, Elgg has a simple social bookmarking tool to make it easier to share resources all over the web. Users simple use a button on their browser toolbar for bookmarking.

An Elgg site can also take advantage of RSS, OpenID, Open Social, serialized XML or PHP and alternative views to create rich mobile applications, plugin, widget and event APIs. Your own interactive social network is a cinch to build with easy-going Elgg tools at your fingertips.
David Tanguay is the owner of Interactive Online who provides Cheap Hosting and Hosting services.