Even though the web effectively isolates us, we have gone and found new ways

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to socialise from our isolated desktops. Emails, instant messages, mailing lists, forums, online networking — each and every one of them developed to help us interact and communicate more efficiently and effectively.

Love it or hate it, social networking is quite the flavour of the season, and if you need your own web-based network independent of the usual suspects like Orkut, MySpace and Facebook, there are number of interesting applications to try out. Plenty of them are full-scale commercial software, but there is a decent free selection as well.

Free networking apps

Elgg was declared 2008’s best social networking application in the Infoworld ‘best of open source awards’, an honour that speaks for itself. Download it from Elgg.org, where one will find support documents if required, though Elgg is generally easy to install, customise and administer. It runs on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP platform, and even users with limited technical know-how ought to find setting it up a breeze.

Elgg is a full-fledged social networking platform out of the box, with advanced user management functions, access control lists, templating engine, support for widgets, mobile phone view and more. A user-friendly dashboard, user avatars, groups, profiles and more are supported. Blogs, message board, private messaging, bookmarks, file sharing and other features can be added via plugins, and users are free to author their own plugins as well. Themes and language packs are also available.

PHPizabi is yet another popular and powerful social networking platform, as demonstrated by over a quarter of a million downloads. PHPizabi’s features include a user desktop with highly configurable personal profiles, blogs, galleries, friends, contact groups, mails, pictures, messaging, chatrooms, file sharing, event notifications, rankings, horoscopes and lots more. The system provides support for registration captcha to keep spambot registrations away, ‘tell/invite a friend’, advanced search, multilingual support, smileys, mass mailing, cropping images among others. PHPizabi runs on either Apache or IIS, and requiring PHP and MySQL, and is again easy to set up. However, depending on the number of users of your network, your storage space will vary, needing about 10 GB for up to 10,000 users.

Dolphin is yet another option for those seeking a powerful, customisable online networking software. This comes with some exciting additional features such as video support for chatting and messaging, video player, as well as desktop and iPhone apps. It has some pretty potent admin tools that allow users to mix and match features for a specialised look. All this is in addition to regular social networking functions, of course. Dolphin is free as long as you retain the developers’ (Boonex) links, though an option of a paid licence exists as well.

Techno-speak

While these aforementioned apps are free and relatively easy to set up, installing, customising and administering a social networking platform does assume some amount of technical know-how. Knowing your way around how web-based software is installed and some amount of knowledge of PHP and MySQL will stand one in good stead. Fortunately, these are neither skills difficult to pick up or hard to come by. The relevant developers’ forums and documentation ought to be a first port of call; otherwise, searching the web is a good option.

Payal Dhar is a freelance technology writer