As most of you know already that Joomla is the largest open-source community driven content management system, Which is both stable and feature packed.In Today Web 2.o world community driven websites attract most of the traffic. Member communities like Facebook and Twitter are visited by 67% of the global online population.A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009
But a community(Member Community) , i.e. a website where people come to your website, over and over again, and where the users interact with each other v
ia your website. Up to now, if you wanted to create a Community website using Joomla, your options were limited to the community builder component, however, JomSocial – the Joomla Social Networking Website component has taken over the lead.
Both Community Builder and JomSocial Work natively within the Joomla 1.5 ie its works without joomla being in legacy mode.The debate on Jomsocial Vs Community Builder has been on in most of the joomla communities.But Community builder is a free component while jomsocial is paid.For anyone looking to build a serious community site these two are the only real options left.
Having used both these components it seems both these components are trying to compete with the likes of Facebook and Myspace bringing about features very similar to facebook.For Example Jomsocial has an activity stream on component frontpage which 
streams real time activity of members.While CB might look the relatively inexpensive way its not.An example would be the ‘Activity stream’. To have it in CB you need to spend 102$ (both module and CB profile tab for super activity).Then the CB Plugin Selection costs 16,95$. You would be paying $119 which is close to the cost of the complete jomsocial component and all the plugins.
This just covers activity and plugins’ management in CB. JomSocial comes ready with these plugins.Easy to use – We’ve run Jomsocial on a site aimed at non-techincal people. Almost all of them have found it easy to upload an image and edit their profile. I couldn’t always say the same about Community Builder.
Jomsocial Supports Video upload directly from the computer and also from other major video sharing sites, and Photo albums with tagging (New Feature from JS 1.5).More Importantly all these plugins comes from one source. Its very important for the security and also for updates that you don’t need to look ten different sources when its time to update.
JomSocial, social publishing platform for Joomla! CMS. Build your own community easily. Create custom profile, maintain groups, social networking tools.
Where a social component adds value to a joomla website is it brings together a number of joomla features such as Photos, Discussion,Videos, Commenting into a single component that invokes community activities.JS doesn’t do a great job at it but its getting there where as community builder lags far behind. Jomsocial and Community builder needs to provide features that reinvent joomla not bringing facebook into joomla.There are several othercomponents that might complement a community component.
MyBlog – Joomla Blogging Component
If you would like to give your users the ability to have their own blogs.Features of the component includes
- Built-in image b ro wser, where you can insert new image with 1 single click.
- Assign categories and multiple tags to any entry.
- Search older blog po st via ajax and link to it within your entry easily.
- Embed video from various sources, easily.
- Built-in word count.
IDoBlog – Joomla Blogging Component
Another Component the IDoBlog is a universal builder. The IDoBlog is a self-sufficient component containing all the necessary functionality and 
the rich resources for creating a blog of any size – from a compact personal blog to a vast social network. Simply install the IDoBlog on your website and make your blog as you wish.But the only drawback is that it comes from a different developer.Jomsocial, Jomcomment and My blog are made by the same Malaysian based Azrul Studios.
HWDMediaShare – Joomla Video Sharing Component
The hwdVideoShare video sharing gallery is an open source (GNU GPL) video sharing Joomla extension that functions like that of other popular video sharing websites such as YouTube. It features multiple uploading tools for large media uploads. The component requires FFMPEG, MENCODER and FLVTOOL2 to run and supports the mpg, mpeg, avi, divx, mp4, flv, wmv, rm, mov, moov, asf, swf and vob video formats.Mind You need a host that supports multimedia content and do remember to get yourself a decent webhost! The last thing you want when you’ve created your website, is that the server buckles under the load.I would opt for using HWVideoshare instead of using jomsocial’s native Video support just because HWDVideoshare is one of the most well supported and documented Joomla Component that I have used and is at a advantage over jomsocial becasue it is specializes in Video Sharing and has a lot more to offer to the members and integrates with jomsocial and Joomla seemlessly.David Horsfall the developer and founder of Horsfall Multimedia helps in the troubleshooting in support forums and also helps in the installation himself.
Jfusion – Joomla Universal User Integration
I had already reviewed about Jfusion before and if you need a forum to support serious discussions with your community then you have two choice on is to use a joomla forum component or a bridge.If you need an out of the box solution with no tweaking then you must go for an joomla component,Then kunena Joomla Forum Component might be the answer for you.It works natively integrates with jomsocial and CB but the as a standalone forum still lags behind in features.The other option is to go for Jfusion – Joomla Universal User Integration.
JFusion is a free GPL Extension for the award winning Content Management System (CMS) Joomla. JFusion provides universal user integration, by extending the Joomla 1.5 user authentication framework without any core hacks.It bridges Phpbb,SMF and Vbulletin all the major bulletin board scripts with Joomla.A Joomla, Jomsocial, Phpbb and Jfusion membership website can be a unique and powerful creation.Jfusion still doesn’t support complete integration with CB or Jomsocial but its under the radar.
Jomcomment - Ajax Joomla Commenting System
An commenting system is essential for a membership driven site to induce activity. Jomcomment from is from Azrul Studio So it it integrates very well with other products from them like Jomsocial and MyBlog.It also integrates wonderfully with third party products like HWDVideoshare and also with native Joomla article system.It brings the power of Ajax into Joomla comments are added on the fly without reloading the whole page. Ajax not only saves you server bandwidth, but new comments appear graceful, slick and smooth.
References Used ;
With so many options available its easy to customise joomla into a social network.Here is my reference to this article and how the above mentioned components have been used judiously to build a unique yet powerful social network.
IndianBee.com – Exclusively Indian Social Network
Linux.com – Welcome to Linux.com: Your Source for All Things Linux
social network india