Social Networking

I wasn't really sure about which forum to post this in, but this seemed more appropriate than the others.

At the moment I am in the beginning stages of creating a social network. At current i've been working on the code for around 2 weeks, but prior to that for a few months I and a few others had been on the drawing board planning certain aspects of the site and what and where to implement them. Currently the development is progressing very slowly.

Our plan is to use Apache, PHP and MySQL for the Social Network.

The Social Network being built is mainly just for friends of the developers in its early stages and will be invitation based only, until we can get the site optimised to a suitable standard to open it to the world. In no way will we be able to compete against those bigger Social Network sites, basically creating a sort of 'alternative' site to others and making it's accessibility easy to hopefully slowly lure some people away from the other sites.

I'm curious as to what features users here would think would be good to implement, as new features or improvements to what are offered on other sites such as Bebo or MySpace.

Thanks.

 

Depends what kind of social networking site is it. Bookmarking? News submission? General?

 

there are a TON of out of the box solutions to look at that have a gazillion features.

Here are some important ones: tags, bulletin board, image/video/audio uploading and posting on your page, referral feature, friends, friends authorization, privacy implementation, good Control panel for the users, user editable CSS for their pages, css tutorial page, picture/music and video gallery for their pages etc etc.
Those are some that are super important.

 

Thanks for the replies -

Just a 'General' Social Network.

I have basically all of them in mind except the audio and video uploading. Thanks for the mentioning of tags because thats something that slipped my mind. The aim with CSS was to provide 2 methods, 'simple' and 'advanced' with simple being that there are a number of fields to change colours etc of various aspects and advanced being where you type and edit it yourself in a text box.