Off-the-shelf products provide quick access to most common features, but their main lacking is in specific customization. One alternative is to create your own social networking website; by rolling your own, you can ensure it functions exactly how you want it to. The downside is the additional development time, technical skills required, and the difficulty in implementing some of the social features which off–the-shelf products have out of the box.

If you want to know more about how you could roll your own social networking site, Packt has a book published on the subject, PHP 5 Social Networking at https://www.packtpub.com/php-create-powerful-dynamic-social-networking-website/book.

Elgg is an open source social networking platform, complete with functionality for setting up profiles, sharing files, adding friends, blogging, aggregating RSS, content tagging, and social graphs. Elgg also has an API allowing developers to extend Elgg by adding additional functionality, as well as a RESTful API to allow other applications to interact with the platform. More information on Elgg is available on their website: http://www.elgg.org/.

There are of course options available which combine using an off-the-shelf system and a custom system, however, these mainly facilitate extending the functionality of the existing social networking platform, or by integrating some of those social aspects with our own website. Such approaches include:

There are many other social networking engines available for this type of approach, although they are not as common as the ones listed earlier. A simple web search will provide a list of additional engines which we can investigate if we wish.