Sociální sítě – jak vytvořit skutečnou sociální síť?

The service sector in a postindustrial society is dominant. With the growth of incomes of the population, standard of living, people's needs also grow. Millions of people shop online every day. How to promote your products? Social networks come to the rescue, where anyone can advertise their product or service. But social networks are not only used for commercial purposes. We began to communicate more often on the Internet than in "real life". Social networks give us a precious opportunity for people to communicate all over the world. People engaged in creativity, thanks to social networks, are lucky to share their creation with others.

As you can see, social networks perform different functions. Therefore, if you want to create your own social network, first of all, you need to answer one important question: "What will my social network give people?" This is very important, because the functionality of the social network and its structure depend on your answer. Let's consider several popular types of social networks.

Types of social networks

1) For communication (relationship networks). Everyone knows giant Facebook and VK

2) For the exchange of various materials (photos, videos, songs and so on). The most famous social networks that belongs to this species are Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, etc.

3) Social networks for feedback and discussions (Online reviews) - Foursquare, Yelp, TripAdvisor and more

4) For mass discussions (collective forums, expert answers) - Quora, Reddit, Digg and similar ones

5) For blogging - LiveJournal, Twitter, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, etc.

6) Social libraries (boards, bookmarks) - Pinterest, Stumble Upon, Scoop.It!, Flipboard and the like.

In general, a social network can perform different functions, but keep in mind an important feature - a narrowing functionality of social networks in a process of evolution. If Facebook is a large-scale company that performs several functions at once, the younger Instagram is aimed at one thing - visual perception of information. Twitter was born much later Facebook, was deliberately designed to transmit compressed information. The main idea that glorified Twitter is to teach people to compress information without losing the essence. Yes, you just aren’t allowed to write huge posts in this social network. It is impossible not to mention such a modern giant as TikTok. TikTok can be accused of promoting the degradation of Internet users. Indeed, unlike YouTube, videos last a couple of seconds, so as a rule, they are entertaining. Let's not be moralists and decide whether it's bad or not. But the simplification trend is noticeable, so perhaps you should also create a social network whose functionality is limited but unique. It is not easy to promote a "large" social network nowadays, companies such as Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte have long occupied their niche.

What should a social network necessarily include?

The developer is the creator of his social network himself, he can create any functionality, design, etc. However, there are some requirements for the implementation of your project. What should your social network necessarily include?

First of all, protect a project. In fact, the social network is currency. Currency has a huge risk of sharply depreciating if it is unreliable and easy to forge. The same thing happens to social networks, websites, programs. You must ensure the confidentiality of your users' personal information, only then they will use your social network safely. The success of Telegram lies precisely in the security of this messenger, because users are sure that their personal information is not available to third parties. The reputation of Facebook and VKontakte has been affected as a result of the facts of transferring personal information to some governments. Confidentiality is a difficult task as social media owners are constantly under pressure from governments and some public organizations. But in any case, you should strive to provide the best security system. In addition, it is worth thinking about protecting against DDoS attacks. During the existence of the World Wide Web, hackers have learned many methods of causing damage to both small IT companies and technological giants. This can be fragmentation of UDP packets, DNS, NTP, UDP, SYN, ACK flood, CharGEN attack, TCP anomalies.

How do you protect yourself from DDoS attacks? In this article, we will not go into details about the types of DDoS traffic, classification and targets of DDoS attacks at OSI layers. This topic deserves another article. Therefore, let's focus on analyzing ways to protect your social network from intruders.

Using large and efficient hardware and software systems from Cisco, you risk to run out of money. Microsoft software is also not cheap too. If you are a novice developer, you should definitely find less effective but cheaper options. Alternatively, for protection you can use cloud services Imperva, Akamai, CloudFlare, Sucuri, Alibaba, Myra, AWS Shield Advanced, etc. For larger projects suit Neustar, Rackspace, Arbor Networks, Radware, F5 Silverline.

Some recommendations help you to reduce, but don't eliminate, such threats. Reading the news, we often come across reports of major cyberattacks on well-known companies and government agencies. Attacks on large corporations are committed as an instrument of dishonest competition, but not only. There's no need to publish racist, extremist materials that may outrage the public. The owner of the social network should have a neutral position, be careful in public statements and so on. But no matter how hard you try, the time will come, and someone will definitely want to harm your project.

Secondly, your social network should have a pleasant, convenient and unique design. To do this, you need to understand things like UI and UX. These concepts are related to the creation of a user interface UI can be defined as a "candy wrapper", this is what the user sees. UX (user experience) in turn is the candy itself. Designers are more involved in UI, and marketers, designers, analysts and so on are involved in UX. You may have a good UI, but a disgusting UX. Both interfaces are important, so keep the balance. To create a user interface, you can adopt such frameworks as Bootstrap, Bulma, Foundation, Semantic UI, UIKit, Materialize.

What is a framework at all? In two words, the framework is a ready-made construction-set for creating a site, including its interface. It includes ready-made templates, a set of tools, libraries and modules. However, to effectively use all the features of frameworks, you should learn the basics of layout (HTML and CSS). This is not programming and if you have a reference book with HTML and CSS scripts at hand, you can easily cope with creating a UI.

Thirdly, your social network should not violate legal norms. Particular attention should be paid to the collection of personal data. The term "personal data" means any personal information about the user (surname, first name, age, photo and video, geolocation, etc.). When registering on a social network, you must provide a new user with a document such as the "Personal Data Processing Policy". It is not necessary to force a new user to read this document when registering, you just need to publish it on your social network. Otherwise, you are at the risk of being fined. Naturally, contents of this document should not be a fairy tale. Next, as to Russian Federation, the primary database of personal data must be located in Russia, but the secondary base may be located in any state-member of Council of Europe that has signed "The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data». Additional list of allowed states specifies in Order of Roskomnadzor "On Approval of the List of Foreign States Not Parties to the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data and Providing adequate protection of the rights of personal data subjects" No. 274.

How to create a social network?

There are three ways to create a website and social network: writing code from scratch, using CMS, using frameworks. Let's consider each option in details.

We have already got acquainted with the framework conception, but it is necessary to explain both sides of this approach.

Advantages of the framework:

1) When using frameworks, the creation of a social network is simplified, as the risk of errors is reduced.

2) The use of frameworks allows you to speed up the work on creating your creation, as you use ready-made designs.

3) The frameworks are flexible, in the future there will be no difficulties in developing and improving the project. The structure of the social network will remain unchanged.

Disadvantages of frameworks:

1) You will still have to write something from scratch, understand the basics of HTML and CSS.

2) Social network security is one of the most important tasks that the developer is obliged to cope with. Otherwise, social network will not receive recognition. The framework has a drawback in this regard. Most frameworks have open-source code, so you have to think carefully about the separate security system in advance.

It remains to analyze two approaches - CMS and writing code from scratch.

CMS is a construction-set too, or more precisely, an almost ready-made site. The main advantage of this method is that there is no need to be a brilliant programmer and layout designer, or oligarch. Why? Because the use of CMS does not require huge set of tools or knowledge of programming languages and frameworks. All you have to do is choose a design template, upload photos, videos and that is all. CMS is similar to a coloring book, and it includes all the creative tools. Pretty easy, isn't it? You've probably heard about such popular CMS scripts as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!

But not everything is so rosy. This method has serious drawbacks.

Disadvantages of ready-made CMS:

1) You'll have to spend money anyway. When you create a site from scratch, the initial costs will certainly be less. The whole problem is that usually you get for free a set of primitive templates, but you will need to spend money on customized one.

2) Limitation of CMS. When writing code from scratch, the developer is a god. Under the important condition that he has good knowledge of layout and programming. CMS is a coloring book whose pictures have a clear outline. Your code will not have flexibility, so you will have to come up with tricks to overcome this limitation. For the sake of fairness, it is worth noting that frameworks are also inclined to this disadvantage. That is, on the one hand, CMS simplifies the logic of assembling a social network, and on the other hand, makes you spend time inventing a bicycle.

3) Low security. Hackers looked into all CMS in details and know the vulnerabilities of even the most famous scripts. This is due to the simple structure of CMS. You can try paid content management systems of the site, they are more reliable, but also imperfect.

4) Ready-made site content management systems (CMS) are "out of box". The social network or site will load slowly, and if the number of requests in a short period of time is at least remotely comparable to Facebook and VK, your social network will go into a deep sleep.

It's time to analyze the disadvantages and advantages of writing code from scratch. Even an inexperienced user understands all the positive and negative aspects of this method. To create your social network from scratch, you must have a significant amount of knowledge in programming, and possibly PR and design. These disadvantages are insignificant if you have enough funds to order a social network in person on freelance exchanges or large IT companies. But it's expensive. However, even if you are as outstanding as Zuckerberg, you are unlikely to be able to manage the social network yourself. You will have to hire PR specialists, an SMM specialist, a social media administrator, a designer, a social media editor, a social media influence agent, a project manager, cybersecurity specialists and so on.

Perhaps it seemed to you that everything was very bad, it was impossible for an ordinary mortal to create a social network, but it's not the truth! It's hard to argue with the fact that nothing comes for free. If there is a goal, desire, self-discipline, then you can easily master programming languages, work with frameworks and CMS. Can't write code from scratch? You can always try other options. It can take a lot of money to create a social network, especially if you write code from scratch. But you can team up with other newcomers and thereby form a development team (Mark Zuckerberg also worked not alone, but with his friends from the university).

And yet we advise you to start with frameworks. You can confidently choose the QSNE (Qwerty Social Networks Engine) platform. This is not an ordinary web-engine, but a huge platform that has a number of advantages.

- Advanced payment system that includes hundreds of different currencies. QSNE independently determines your country and, accordingly, the national currency. At the same time, you can manually change this data.

- The QSNE platform supports many languages, has useful correction tools for translators. The system automatically detects the language of the new user, which can be changed at any time.

- QSNE is provided with reliable protection against all kinds of DDoS and other types of attacks. The system automatically notifies providers of failures.

- Qwerty AI artificial intelligence (flexible customization, smart publication ranking, technical support for users).

- Qwerty Social Network Engine has a file cloud, analogous to Google Drive. Users can store information, exchange information, and access settings for this information. The main advantage is that the content of the cloud can be attached to posts on the social network, it can be transferred to other users. This makes work very easy.

- Billing and payment control systems integrated with notification services, collection and displaying of statistics, etc.

- Collection of news from authoritative and reliable sources.

- In addition to protecting against external attacks on the platform, QSNE is interested in creating a secure environment for users. The attacker will not be able to choose a password, all actions are logged, there is a two-level authorization.

- The user can independently set up his privacy

- QSNE uses aggressive data caching, which reduces the load and speeds up the work of the social network. All large social networks use such technology.

- The platform has the ability to trade. Smart contract systems and "safe transactions", internal transaction arbitrage, customizable automation and sales logistics work.

- A powerful mail server that will not overload your social network.

- To the issue of security, Qwerty Social Network has built-in antivirus software to check content for malware before publication.

- Own link shortening service system

- Protection against spam, bots, parsing (automated collection of information by third-party services).

- Availability of a search engine

- Ability to create communities (functional similar to VK)

- SMM tools (in other words - advertising, promotion)

- Ability to search for people and add them as friends

- Built-in messenger (instant messaging system) integrated with QAIM artificial intelligence capabilities

- End-to-end tagging of any content and data in the information flow.

- Modules for interaction with SMS gateways and telephone services.

In general, QSNE (Qwerty Social Network Engine) provides not only the basic functions that any modern social network should have, but also advanced and important tools.

How to tell the world about your social network?

Once again, remember that a huge number of various social networks have been created at present, and they have already conquered their niche. To make your social network as viral as Tik-Tok, Facebook, VK, you must give it a zest, make it unique. Track trends to be up to line and analyze the needs of society, fashion and so on. Ask yourself a question: "What am I missing on social networks?" Maybe you want to integrate augmented reality? Improve people's communication through hidden forced teamwork? There are millions of shy people on our planet who hesitate to make acquaintances, share their impressions and creatives. Maybe it's worth creating a social network for introverts, no matter how contradictory it may sound? All you have to do is create a friendly atmosphere, impose a ban on aggressive behavior, give more tools to creative people. And do not forget the golden rule - " treat people the way you want them to treat you." Some popular social networks seem to have forgotten about it due to megalomania and the desire to make money on modern socio-political problems, and now resemble a repressive kingdom. One streamers and bloggers are blocked for expressing their point of view, and others, even for insulting and inciting national enmity, are not punished. Treat all users as equal people, otherwise you will lose your reputation and provoke DDoS attacks on your own servers, incurring losses. The rules are the same for everyone!

Let's move from philosophical instructions to practical advice. Every invention needs advertising. Fortunately, in the XXI century, humanity accumulated a huge amount of knowledge in the field of advertising.

Promote your social network wherever you can. First of all, there is no need to invest millions of dollars only in marketing, you can start with small things. Not all celebrities became so thanks to money. Many people started their way to success small, by publishing their creativity and products on social networks, participating in various events, conferences, exhibitions, etc. Imagine that your social network is a virus. This virus spreads faster where there is more crowds. The more unique the virus is in structure, the more "happy victims" and vectors. The social network simply has to be "contagious".

You can post a promotional video of the social network on Tik-Tok, but it should "capture" the minds of young people so that they just will want to learn more about your social network. Yota used the primitive advertising at first, an ordinary blue background that lasted a few seconds. It didn't have sound, pictures, video, nothing familiar. And it was interesting to know who came up with this, and what is Yota at all? You may think it’s ridiculous, but in fact such advertising is "contagious" in nature.

We have developed clip thinking; we are used to watching expensive advertisements of famous brands. Conversely, monotonous advertising with some incomprehensible text flow is no longer so interesting. You can't load the viewers too much; they predictably love bread and show.

Branding is the main thing in marketing. It's not about interface design, but about the presentation of a social network. The logo of your social network should be conspicuous, a lot depends on it. There is one not very ethical way to distribute advertising - graffiti and flyers. People who have no idea what the concept of "anarchism" is recognize the symbols of this ideology on the walls of houses, on sidewalks, in leaflets. Such symbols are quite widely used in some European countries, attracting the attention of young people. Try to form a cult or myth around your network, add a little mystery. Hire talented artists, designers to create the right design. In Russia, probably everyone knows Artemy Lebedev Studio, their work raises many questions, especially when you find out the price for one logo (the cheapest is 100,000 roubles). Someone calls their work ugliness, shame and the like. But customers pay this studio not for the logo that can be created by the child, but for the PR itself. They will create a "poor" logo for the coffee shop, but due to the popularity of the studio itself, the logo will be actively discussed on the Internet, inspiring memes. As a result, the “ugly” logo is an ordinary PR step, and in some cases successful.

Your social network, like a rock band on stage, should have its own front man. It can be you, a close friend or some specialist. Its appearance should be as memorable and unique as your social network. Choose a catchy image, go to oratory courses, be charismatic. Sometimes even the smallest detail can become unique. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is known all over the world for his socks. He wears a business suit, leather shoes, but prefers socks with ducks, fruits. It looks funny, but Trudeau is remembered for this, standing out against the background of other "dark suits». If you have money, then the choice of PR tools expands. You should establish contacts with the most famous media, bloggers, magazines, organize mass events on behalf of your company, initiate a press conference. Let's not forget about posts from top bloggers on the Internet and banal advertising on main TV channels.

You may have heard about one of the leading areas of modern PR - digital marketing. It involves creating your own website where you can advertise your social network, interact with certain, target platforms and online media that will create a "massify effect", that is, discussions. It also includes viral marketing (creation of thematic games, applications), ordering reviews and comments on special sites (in Russia, for example, Otzovik, Yandex), conducting online events, creating information content.

There is another curious method of marketing - PR on someone else’s trouble. It sounds unpleasant, but since it's capitalism, it's quite honest. Suppose the Kuzya platform for streaming irrevocably loses popularity due to an inattentive policy towards its users. Former users are running, but here you come - a white knight, a vaccine against all diseases, a superhero. You need to present your social network as the exact opposite of that "rotten". It is at this point that social network advertising should be active. It is necessary to order articles from well-known media, interview, continue to reduce reputation of Kuzya, give some bonuses for registration in your social network. Everyone should talk about yourself and your creation. It can take a lot of money, but nevertheless, this method also exists!

Conclusion

Don't overstate your expectations in advance. It can take years and a lot of money and nerves to develop a social network. In our rapidly changing world, it is difficult to come up with something new, even the idea itself will take a lot of time and effort. However, this does not mean you must give up and forget about your dreams. It's worth starting step by step, and trying the methods of creating a social network tactfully, rationally. You shouldn't hesitate to talk about your ideas. Now the phrase "Do not tell anyone about your plans..." has become fashionable. Really? Yes, if famous scientists, inventors had not told anyone about their plans, their creations would not have found support and demand. How to find like-minded people to form a team if you are shy? The process of developing a social network is a huge risk, but the one who does not take risks does not live! Good luck with your endeavors!