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The internet exists mainly because we are social animals. Social media is just the latest form of groups of people sitting around the campfire.
One such example of this comes from Groupon a group buying service who attributes much of its success and growth to the ability for users to easily share the daily deal with their social circle.
We see this happen often when we login into Facebook. Someone sharing the latest GroupOn or LivingSocial deal and enticing their friends to join them in purchasing. You could argue that GroupOn wouldn’t even have had a chance if it wasn’t for the popularity of social media.
There have been other attempts of similar services in the past but those have not grown as fast or as big. We’ve watched the rise of GroupOn and would argue the main reason for this is the usage of social networks.
When developing a social network what are the key elements you want in place?
People are getting sick of registering and declaring their friends on each and every site. Lost passwords, multiple logins, and entering the same information over and over is one of the reasons why new networks fail to grow to their full potential.
We have include more within our special report titled How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website
Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect is Facebook’s latest addition to its development platform. It enables developers to leverage the power of Facebook’s social context in existing, third-party Web sites. The platform features seamless, one-click authentication, Facebook friend account linking, distribution back into Facebook streams, and the full power of the Facebook REST-like API and FQL. Utilizing Facebook Connect for authentication has proven to dramatically increase site exposure and new user registrations.
OpenID
You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit.
OpenID is rapidly gaining adoption on the web, with over one billion OpenID enabled user accounts and over 50,000 websites accepting OpenID for logins. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, and many more.
ALLOW EASY OF SHARING CONTENT
One key element you want to design within a social network is the ability for content to be shared with other social platforms. A great example of this is a recent change by YouTube. You’ll notice that when you watch a video from YouTube you get these options:
That is just the beginning, to learn more about what elements your custom social network should include visit this page to download our special report on How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website.