Guidelines for Creating Social Networks

People use social networks to meet new people, stay in touch with friends and even make business connections. Additionally, a social network is used for building a community based on common interests, where many people can share their knowledge, opinions and interests.

Here are a few guidelines that provide "cool" things to include and pitfalls to avoid when creating a social network:

1. The social network must be capable of making and organizing connections.  This is a primary required feature within any network.  The organization of connections may be based on interests, hobbies, sports, profession and so on dependent on the network category desired.
2. The social network should consist of basic features such as profiles, ability to search people, friend lists, messages, groups or organizations, and photos.
3. Integrate the social network so that it will work on the desktop as well as on a mobile device as people are much more mobile today and want to be able to access their social network anytime and from anywhere.
4. It is very crucial to offer a service for the social network that is unique and has a "stickiness" to it so that it gets a wide traction and users find it compelling and interesting to come back and use it on an ongoing basis.  Examples are a news feed, notifications, messages, applications (i.e. funwall), etc.
5. Make the social network easy to use, easy for members to sign up and invite their friends.
6. Make sure that the social network includes support for OpenSocial and can be integrated with the prevalent social networks (i.e. facebook, flickr, myspace, twitter, linkedin, etc.)
7. Avoid creating yet another social network that simply replicates what is already available today (i.e. another facebook, myspace, twitter, and so on).