Elgg

 Are you looking for a powerful medium for communicating with your family and friends? Do you prefer maintaining a net based relationship with your employees than calling them up every now and then? Are you a developer, dissatisfied with the available social networks? If you answered yes to any of the questions above then its time to switch to Elgg !

Elgg is a popular social networking platform. Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh are the masterminds behind it. It was voted the best networking platform of 2008.

The Elgg is a innovative and easy to handle developing tool. A huge number of sites are already available in this base and numerous more already in the programmer's workshop. It allows a variety of functions. It lets users to write articles, blogs ,etc and publish it instantly. It even supports community Web formation,i.e. it actually helps you to start your own social and educational network . That's right! You can finally socialize the way you want to. No more restrictions! The best part is that every Tom, Dick and Harry can do it, as we are provided with high tech plugins and play features preloaded in Elgg. Even the maintenance of control activities, customization solutions etc are provided for.

With Elgg, making friends is as easy as  abc. The only effort on the part of the user is the sign up .The Elgg contains the usual options of a social network like profile customization, add or remove friends, etc. You can block the people you don’t wish to socialize with. Then there's  photo sharing, private messaging too. This means you can completely represent you're tastes and choose the crowd you hangout with, what more could you want?

The elgg networking platform is a developer's  dream come true. One major advantage of elgg is its scalability. i.e it manages and handles the sudden increase or decrease in the population of a site. An OpenID support is being developed as part of a project called Open Academic- which will allow a single login across installations of Elgg, Moodle, Drupal and MediaWiki,etc. Elgg has a vast widget collection by default, it helps easy development and customization as well. Elgg has numerous plug-ins which are expandable and allow addition of other methods s well. Elgg's code and structure thus serves as a starting stone to several avenues like business, schooling and associations.

Elgg is also primarily an open source social networking software. That means its available free of cost. It can be easily downloaded and meddled with. The main plus point about this is that its always growing and expanding. It provides individuals, organizations with the components and tools needed to create a suitable online social environment. The main functions are stuff like blogging, microblogging, file sharing, networking, group formation and among a number of others.

Elgg has been licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation. Technically, Elgg is powered on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) platform. Elgg is also used as the engine of the N-1/Lorea. Its also the main social network of the Spanish 15-M political movement.

Elgg is described by its founders as a 'learning landscape', Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, with podcasting capabilities, an online profile and an RSS reader too. Additionally, all of a user's content can be tagged with keywords - so they can connect with other users with similar interests and create their own published learning network. However, where Elgg differs from other social networks is the degree of control each user is given over who can access their content.

The new version 0.7, is rumored to come with a customizable dashboard and widget creator, as well as a revamped interface.In addition there will be a vastly

improved admin panel to allow people a higher degree of control over their site through a visual interface. Let's hope this all works out and that Elgg's future continues to bloom !