Facebook/Myspace type website...

[WalterRam]

Facebook and Myspace are obviously taking over the world but how do you build a website in this type of social networking template. Im not looking at rivaling anything like this but trying to scale it down to one specialist subject.

Im no website wizard and therefore wondered if anyone could pass on any advice? Is this type of thing relatively straightforward to have built?

[Astaroth]

It depends exactly what functionality you need and what scale the site is to operate on. The MySpace story from a technology point of view is fairly well documented and all the issues they had as they grew.

There are a number of off the shelf scripts you can buy for straight forward social network sites and then it is simply a case of skinning them. Alternatively of cause you can pay developers to either develop from scratch or customise an existing script to give you more unique functionality.

[Interconnect IT]

You could use something like BuddyPress, which is based on some fairly straightforward technology that's relatively well understood. Not that it's exactly mature technology yet, however.

vBulletin has some social style tricks up its sleeve and is well regarded. It all depends on what exactly you're trying to achieve, but a real and successful social site is often a significant undertaking.