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Want to start your own Craigslist? Facebook? MySpace?

By Derik | August 19, 2007

Graphic Design Blog » Elgg, Your Own Open Source Social Network
OK can I just say, this could be HUGE! There I said it.
Occasionally I see posts in ELance and Craigslist for someone who wants a “MySpace” type application.
Well, here it is and it’s FREE!

Elgg is an Open Source (free) program to do just that, I have been reading a little about it in .Net Magazine and hope to have a dabble with it when I can. Elgg can be downloaded and run from your own server and then looks like it has a lot of the features of community sites such as MySpace, Facebook etc. I was looking into scripts like this a few months ago but then they were costing a few hundred dollars (and I didn’t know if they worked), but Elgg is free.

Features of Elgg

* Blogging
* Social networking
* File repositories for individuals and communities
* Podcast support
* Full access controls
* Supports tagging
* User profiles
* Full RSS support
* RSS aggregator
* Create communities
* Collaborative community blogs
* Create ‘friends’ networks
* Import content
* Publish to blog
* Multilingual
* Branding/customisation
* OpenID support - coming soon

Elgg requires requires an Apache web server with mod_rewrite installed and the ability to send emails, plus PHP 4.3+ and MySQL 4.1+ (Postgres can also be used).

There are a limited number of themes currently available but these are editable with CSS and I am sure as Elgg grows in popularity the number of themes will increase.