There are many decisions to make when deciding to go with privates social networking sites. If you hate the administrative overhead, there are some “freemium” type of hosting services such as Ning and CollectiveX. Basically you can either a “free” private social networking site with a vender host name like yournetwork.ning.com or yourname.collectivex.com, or you can cough out some monthly subscription fee to use your own domain and some advanced features. And apparently these hosting providers put ads on the free sites to cover their cost (and sometimes to make a profit).

If you want DIY, there are options, too. Some open source packages exist there. Ellg is a PHP based open source social networking framework, and Community Engine is a Rails based one. If you want to stick to OpenSocial standards, Apache’s Shindig is worth looking into. In addition, Shindig has implementations in both Java and PHP. Partuza is an example open source social networking that uses Shindig implementation of PHP.

There is another PHP based open source social networking project called U Center Home. It looks nice. However, I am confused by its license. On their sourceforge page, the license is GPL, while on their corporate site, the license says – “free for personal/non-profit use”.