Social networking sites and forums

Forums go back even before the World Wide Web, when early adapters gathered on places like CompuServe to exchange plain text messages.

Social networking sites like Facebook are basically forums on steroids. You can message people privately or publicly, share photos, videos, what have you.

One of the nice things about social networking sites are that the visitors provide most of the content—you don’t have to.

The issues involved in creating and running a social networking site:

• Time. Yes, the visitors contribute most of the content, but a site like this does not run itself. It will need a moderator or moderators, if only to track spam and other violations of the terms of service.
• Hosting. If you’re hosting on an outside provider such as Ning, you must meet their terms of service, and stay within their guidelines. If you’re hosting the site yourself and it gets popular, you’ll be consuming a lot of space and bandwidth, and will probably need to have your own server.
• Security and other legal issues. You’re storing people’s emails and other private data. You’re allowing folks to use your site to “talk” to each other on the web, and not all of them talk nice. You need to be very sure of your legal ground, and have ironclad terms of service and privacy policies.