The centres in CEE serve mainly European clients. Locations such as Krakow offer proximity. Geographical proximity is important - although we tend to think of global services as a virtual business, in fact, there is a real need for partners, customers and providers to meet face to face, and from Krakow you can be with the client anywhere in Europe within 2 to 3 hours. And then there is cultural proximity - I think this can be a little overplayed, but on the other hand, if the requirement is native or near native speakers in Dutch, Portuguese or Finnish you will find these in Krakow.

Elgg is ugly as sin, a pain to theme and has poor usability. But it’s stable and has all the features anyone would need.

BuddyPress is elegant, easy to theme and has stellar usability. But it’s still in development and it’s lacking a lot of features. I mean, the only thing you can do in a group is post a comment to the wire. No pages. No files. No pictures. No collaboration.

So I’d say… put up with Elgg if you need something right now… or… if you can… wait a year and go with BuddyPress. It will be the hands down winner in the end. Unless Elgg cleans up their interface and usability and makes theme development easier.

PLENTY of firms are trying to profit from the gold rush towards so-called social networking  sites after the success -or at least popularity- of Facebook, Linkedin, Hi5, and other such sites. And the cost of entry for new players is getting lower all the time.

Facebook may be one of the fastest-growing social network sites, but its technology is far from unique. Besides the existing entrenched competitors, small software firms are also selling scripts that allow anyone to start a Facebook look-alike site for three-digit figures. Of course, those new sites do not have the third-party applications nor any significant number of users when they start up, but those also help dilute the novelty appeal of the concept. Consider webmail: at one point all webmails were the same, until Google came along and reinvented the concept with its GMail.

And now, even Open Source software is getting into the game of offering anyone the ability to create their own social network. All bad news for Facebook which will continue to see competing sites mushrooming. In short, its underlying technology is not unique and, being a web service in the "cloud", can be easily copied. Copycat sites are appearing all over the place and targeting different market niches, whereas Facebook positions itself as the "one size fits all" of social networks.

A firm from India sells a script to run your own "face book" site for £210. Now Open Source software is offering similar abilities to create social network sites.

For instance, there's a handful of popular Facebook clones in operation in China, and those have been in operation for a long time, even before Facebook landed with its own site. About six months ago there was a good comparison of existing Facebook clones published over here.

In Russia, Facebook had to face Vkontakte, the locally-developed, Russian language social network site when it decided to land in the country with a Russian-language Facebook last year. And in Germany there was StudiVZ, sued by Facebook as it claimed it was a "counterfeit product" due to the similar look and feel.

But while most of the high-end Facebook clones already in operation were likely developed in-house, last year we saw plenty of small outfits trying to profit from the social networking gold rush by selling turnkey solutions - scripts written in PHP or other server side languages - for around $500 or even less. These allow anyone with a hosting account or server to create his own basic Facebook copycat. Of course, without the complexity and array of features of the real one - much less the user base.

What shocked this scribbler  however is the sheer number of people who continue trying to create their own social network web site from scratch by hiring freelance programmers, and hoping to hit gold as if there were not enough Hi5s, LinkedIns and Facebooks in the webosphere already - see here or here. Of course, the availability of lots of search engines didn't stop a pair of clever guys from creating Google. But we can't help but think there's a bubble of sorts in this social network sites craze.

The only apparent reasons to start coding a new Facebook clone site from scratch seem to be, (a) if you have revolutionary ideas for new features -in other words you want to create the Facebook killer that doesn't resemble any of the existing sites. Or (b), you want to target a special market niche which requires special needs. For the rest, the small shops offering ready-made turnkey solutions can be enough to have a Facebookalike site up and running in a matter of hours or days rather than months. Why would anyone want to run a social site, well, that's a different question. Unless of course you have a very specific market niche.

Some commercial FB clone offerings
One such piece of code that claims to offer a "face book clone" - notice the very wise wording and spacing :) - is dubbed Kootali and sold by "Agriya info way" a firm from Chennai, India. The firm is selling its server side application for $297, £210 or €232 and for that you get "99.9% source code", whatever that missing 0.1 per cent means.

Another company that has been offering for quite some time its own social networking software "like Facebook" calls it "SocialGroupie" and it sells for $490, £345 or €384.

The CMS approach
Others build a "facebook clone" on top of existing Content Management System (CMS) back end software, like the popular Drupal. One such scripts is dubbed "Kickwork", and is listed over here. Ebizon charges between $900 and $3000 per project for customization.

Open Source enters the picture
And as if all this wasn't enough, and the barrier of entry wasn't already low enough with £200 scripts from India, there's now Joomunity described as "a facebook clone for Joomla" in other words, a community site and social network built on top of the popular Joomla CMS.

Joomunity, of which version 1.1.0 beta3 has been released two weeks ago is GNU/GPL Free Software, with no licence fees and all source code available for you to hack. Find it over here.

As some have noted, except for the use of the Facebook name, there's very little Facebook can do to sue copycat sites, unless they make an exact copy of the HTML or bitmaps, you don't have many chances of winning a trial on the U.S. on the grounds of user interface look and feel, at least after the landmark Lotus vs. Borland legal case.

So what are you waiting for? There is certainly room on the Net for a thousand more Facebook clones. Or is there? In any case, this scribbler hopes the open source project thrives and kills all the cheap for-profit knock-offs.

it makes a lot more sense to keep your information in specialist sites. Last.fm for my music, Flickr for my photos, Youtube for Videos, del.icio.us for my bookmarks, LinkedIn for my business profile. It is better because these sites specialise in your information and what to do with that information. Using Facebook for your CV is a really bad idea, not only because there are lots of photo’s of you doing all kinds of things in the dark (on FB), but also because it has a poor structure for something like a CV.

Facebook Connect is the next evolution of Facebook Platform - enabling you to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into your own site. Enable your users to...

• Seamlessly "connect" their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Facebook Connect, the system the company has long discussed as "Facebook on sites all around the web," enters general availability today and we've got one big question - should website owners use Facebook or OpenID to authenticate and learn about their users?

Elgg is the cream of the crop of open source social network software, a group which includes other products such as Dolphin, PHPizabi, LovdbyLess. It’s also significantly superior to low cost white label social network software such as Handshakes, phpFoX, SocialEngine, and so on.

Elgg stands out because
a) It looks beautiful and has a good feature set out of the box
b) Encourages the community to contribute to the project with plugins and themes. It aims to be to social networking what Drupal/Joomla are to CMS systems.

However, if scalability is a top or immediate concern, be warned Elgg may not be suited for you. Elgg attempts to make plugin development extremely easy by avoiding the need to directly work with or even think about the database. All blog posts, blog comments, wall posts, forum discussions, plus data your plugins may save are stored into a single metadata table. Over time that table will become huge and umanageable. 

Further, the database is laid out in a highly normalized form which is not ideal for performance, as it requires joins to be performed over multiple tables. A quick look at the db profiler shows many page loads that require over 100 db queries. 

Therefore I would recommend that only small scale web sites use Elgg for now unless they are confident in their abilities to optimize the architecture. 

Scaling the Elgg Database Hardware

If you plan to leave the core of the Elgg engine untouched you will likely have to rely on standard database replication to scale the database.

Replication is a process in which a “master” server receives all writes and pushes the queries to its “slave” servers. Reads can be split between the master and the slaves. Unlike with partioning, replication requires that every database server keep a copy of the full data set. Therefore, you can’t use commodity hardware to split the work up between many small servers. Instead you will have to rely on small number of superservers to be able to scale Elgg. Thats the only way that the metadata table will not kill your performance.

Introducing a Cache

Elgg does not use persistent caches. If you are willing to modify the engine of Elgg (which will make upgrading much more difficult), using a cache will likely improve performance greatly. I prefer to cache granular data; for example I would cache the user row from the database instead of the user profile page. However, with Elgg’s use of join queries, it may be difficult to properly invalidate and update the cache when data changes.

You will have to selectively search for the appropriate places to introduce a cache (I suggest memcached). Start with simple queries that are repeated on every page load but rarely change such as loading the site settings. Then, look for other queries that work on single tables (no joins). If your social network is not a walled garden, there are probably even many pages that you can cache on a full page basis using either memcached or even squid. For example, Wikipedia has customized user pages but for the most part they can cache full pages.

Conclusion

Elgg looks like it is shaping up the be the premier open source social network tool by far. It is in active development and has a growing community supporting it. Plugin development is simple and allows for rapid deployment. Use Elgg if you need to get your site live ASAP and are focusing on a niche area with under 100,000 users unless you are prepared to do some heavy optimization. But if you want to be the next Facebook or MySpace or even something like Hi5, there is no chance Elgg will be able to scale in its current form. On the bright side, the Elgg developers promise significant speed improvements in the 1.1 version which is scheduled to be released shortly.

Best-in-Class companies indicated that they currently implement formal and documented sales processes (66%), solicit the support of senior management for internal-facing social media solutions (55%), and currently have, or plan to have in the near future, defined performance metrics to measure the impact of social media on sales productivity.

This new challenge has caused a number of companies to implement social media solutions within the enterprise as a way to more effectively connect sales representatives to the subject-matter experts they seek. A recent study, "Sales 2.0: Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration," conducted by the Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), reveals that 59% of Best-in-Class companies consider the use of social media collaboration tools within the sales department to be a priority to the organization, compared to 35% of all others.