Online community websites and portals have become a crucial part of business these days. It helps user’s organizations to make their presence on the web and bring together the users. Many corporate groups offer cost-effective solutions for managing the organizations community. The solutions help the communities to come together, share thoughts, ideas and information online.

The solution offered is usually a line of codes that can be tailored as per the organizations requirement and are called the social network-scripts. If the business has a requirement to start an online social networking business or need to build a social networking site for a professional community, then open source social networking scripts would be the best choice.

The success stories of the top community websites like Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook rely on the networking power of the groups or communities. The content shared via these communities can be commercialized with proper marketing. The open-source social networking scripts are of various advantages to the business.

• Highly interactive social networking sites can be built with the help of this software.
• Either we can add features to an existing website or create a new community website as such with several features.
• There are scripting solutions available which can be tailored according to the nature of the community being formed. Whether it is a professional community, friend’s network, intra-organizational community, marketing place or even a dating community, there are groups which offer the open-source social networking scripts to suit your requirement.
• The open-source social networking scripts are more preferred as it lets in the user to customize the created site. If the source code is not open, the user might not be able to customize the site created.
• The script always comes with a license and some offer a very cheap license fee and later the updation fee would be much higher. So need to be careful while purchasing the licensed source codes.
• The groups which offer the scripts would usually have a community or forum for discussing the customer issues. Going through this would give us an idea of if the solution is suitable for the business or not.
• The various features in these open source social networking scripts include modules for new chats, blogs, forums, ratings, guestbook, and gift stores etc. They also come with Peer to peer messengers, instant messaging, Voice call facility, discussion boards and usage of smiley as well.
• Community websites would help the organization to efficiently manage the communities and can always be connected to the communities online.
• If a new business product has to be marketed, a community website would be the best choice. Certain solutions even offer safe codes for monetary transactions as well.

It would be best to consider the few things while looking for a social networking script for your business. As stated earlier, there could be traps in between, but the business can’t afford to drop its community website once begun, or it affects the organizations reputation sometimes.