Big review on TechCrunch of 34 different white label social networking platforms. It's mostly a comparison chart, but it's still a ton of information. 

One of the nice things about open source is you can build a site/web app quickly with it. But the downside is if you go with the vanilla install and only spend an hour or two customizing it, you don't have much to differentiate yourself from other sites using the same open source product.

For example, I've heard people complain about WordPress (open source blogging platform), saying that the sites you can make with it "all look like WordPress sites." I think that's true if you go with the same themes everyone else does. But with a little effort, your site can look totally unique.

When Mashable ran an article yesterday about Pligg being for sale, Pete Cashmore mentioned that "we get around 3 Pligg-powered sites submitted to Mashable every day." Obviously I don't see 3 Pligg-site reviews each day, so it means that most of them are turned down.

I asked Pete in the comments how he decides which ones (if any) to write about.

Me: Pete, out of curiosity, since there are so many submissions, how do you decide which ones to write about? Are most of the submissions vanilla installs with an hour or two of customization, and thus you write about the ones that are truly novel, or significantly enhanced, or are backed by an actual business/management unit?

Pete: Just answered your own question. ;)

Granted, my question was a bit leading, but I at least wanted some confirmation, correction, and/or elaboration.

10 open source social apps mentioned on Mashable. One I hadn't heard of .. MugShot. Well I heard of MugShot, but didn't know it was open source. ;)

Or at least Pligg.com is for sale.

 

Techcrunch and Mashable posted that Pligg is for sale, mainly because it was too much work for the current Pligg team to keep maintaining the code and community for free.

Pligg is an open source Digg clone that makes it easy to start your own social web site. Pligg has over 60,000 downloads, and many sites use it, but it's not like whomever buys it will sudden get to start charging current Pligg users.

Pligg is currently open source, and I assume that the current version of the source will have to stay that way. If the new owners try to charge money for it, someone will probably fork the current code to keep it free. Instead, the new owner will mainly get the Pligg web site, the forum, the Pligg name, and control of the current sourceforge repository. A good monetizing move might be to offer paid installation, support, and customization for open source software, something I've been doing more of personally at DevelopmentNow.

 

InvestingMinds is a new social network for serious investors. It features all the typical social network elements (friends, forums, groups, chat, IM, blogs, photos, etc.). InvestingMinds also offers a wiki where members can view and edit financial terms and information about their favorite stocks, plus users can create their own stock portfolios. Lastly, the site offers original content in its articles area.

 

 Sk*rt is a new (well, since may 07) social bookmarking site branded as a "Digg for women," allowing users to submit, rate, and comment stories & links in a variety of categories. It definitely has it's own bright, welcoming feel, as opposed to more tech-heavy sites like Digg, Slashdot, etc.

An interesting point is that Sk*rt is powered by Pligg, an open source Digg clone. Leveraging existing software allowed Sk*rt to get up & running very quickly, because instead of writing a lot of software, they could instead configure & rebrand Pligg.

However, Sk*rt has to make their source code available under Pligg's Affero license. They may not need to provide everything they've written, but certainly any modifications to Pligg's codebase would need to be provided, and I wonder if they would also need to open source their Pligg template, design, and any other addons.

Once again we see software as a commodity, and at least for Sk*rt (for now), their competitive advantage isn't their code. Instead it's their design, branding, marketing, content, user base, financials, and management.

After all, if all that mattered were code & features, the slew of Digg & MySpace clones would have already come to the forefront.

Below are some web sites where you can browse cool web designs, get free templates, and/or find a designer.

• Open Source Web Design
• Open Web Design (shares a lot of content w/ OSWD)
• CSS Remix
• faveup
• screenfluent
• webcreme

Good to get ideas on looks, colors, etc.

10 good blog articles. Kudos to Colin C.

TechCrunch had a great overview of some top turnkey SNS providers a week or so ago. They plan to also do a review soon of some downloadable solutions and custom providers.

The three loyal readers of my blog know I had a writeup a while back of free/cheap SNS tools. phpFox, Dolphin, & Handshakes are pretty popular. Elgg is big in the education field. Pligg (and its many cousins under the Affero GPL license) is more of a Digg clone, but people keep mentioning it. And there are a bunch more.

A lot of them are written in PHP, so if you're handy with code, you can often get open source platforms to do what you want/need them to do. But remember that if you use open source software as a foundation for your startup, you may be required to release any modifications you make to that codebase. Various factors affect that, of course.

Open source exists to help people ramp up & leverage the work of a community, but comes with a stipulation that if you modify and/or try to profit from that work, you often have to release your enhancements back to the community. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as your business plan takes that into account. There are plenty of companies who build or leverage open source, help the community, and yet still make money doing it.

Good article on WindowSecurity.com about securing RDP using SSL. Important for PCI Compliance & better security in general.

Note that if you already have an SSL certificate from GeoTrust, etc. you can just use that certificate instead of creating a new one.

To do so:

• Under Request TLS/SSL certificate:
• For step 10 you'd choose "Import" and pick your existing SSL cert & allow the storage location based on the cert.
• Skip steps 11-14
• Under Configure the Workstation
• Skip steps 1-4 about importing the certificate
• You can download the latest RDP Connection software (version 6) here.

I just noticed on Mosso's FAQ that they now support .NET 2.0 & .NET 3.0. That's good news, since when I looked at them before they only supported ASP.NET 1.1.

FYI Mosso is a hosting provider targeted towards designers & developers that want to resell hosting to their clients. They're interesting in a few ways. First off, they offer "True Hybrid" technology, allowing you to run PHP and ASP.NET sites from the same set of files. So you can FTP some PHP files and some ASP.NET files into the same directory on your account, and they'll both work (they can't talk to each other, though). They also offer 24/7 support & automated billing services that you can resell for your clients.

IMO their hosting offering is a bit pricey -- $100/mo, which could get you a few VPSes at other hosts. But again, they're hoping that their billing, support, PHP/ASP.NET hybrid servers, and turnkey process will win them some business. I know from experience that sometimes saving $20-50/month ends up costing you far more than that in lost time. So, we'll see.

BTW I am not a current Mosso customer -- I just think their offering is unique & interesting. :)

Marc Andreessen's synopsis of the facebook platform/API is a good read for would-be social developers. Not that developers are social, er, I mean developers for social networks.

Favorite quote from Marc's article (emphasis mine):

"[W]hen your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up."

He's referring to iLike's explosion in particular, but it's good to remember that if you introduce something compelling in a huge, extremely viral environment, you can get a lot of traffic very quickly. Probably a good idea to have the phone numbers of a few content delivery networks ready.

You can now scroll more easily through data in Excel 2007, as told in IM chat form (inspired by 37 signals' Fireside Chat posts). BWS = me, DSM = Scott.

[08:46] BWS: heh Excel 2007 has a cool new feature
[08:46] BWS: when you're dragging a cell down
[08:46] BWS: you know how the further you move your mouse, the faster it drags & scrolls?
[08:46] DSM: yah
[08:47] DSM: and then you whizz past where you want to go
[08:47] BWS: yes
[08:47] BWS: well in older Excel I would always end up scrolling too fast & going way beyond the last row of data
[08:47] BWS: well
[08:47] BWS: it now automatically slows down the scrolling
[08:47] BWS: when you get to the end
[08:47] DSM: nice
[08:47] BWS: kinda like how at a gas pump, if you prepay for an amount it automatically slows down
[08:47] DSM: yeah
[08:47] BWS: I think I will blog about this new scrolling thing