by Branavan Ganesan

Created on: April 16, 2008   Last Updated: January 18, 2012

In this day and age, creating your own social network can be very easy. With the advent of high availability broadband and enhanced graphics, you don't necessarily have to be a great writer to create a social network around yourself or your interests. However, the level of your success will directly depend on how hard you work at it.

Here's a roadmap to creating a social network

Find the right site

First things first. Decide how you want to portray yourself, and who you have common interests with. That will help you decide which social network to go and join. While FaceBook and MySpace are the two big giants in terms of social networking sites, that might not necessarily be right for you. A recent article on Yahoo News highlighted that there are a lot of niche sites developing around specific interests for people who find MySpace and FaceBook just too big. Do some Google searches on things that interest you and add 'social network' at the end and see what you come up with.

Pictures, movies, podcasts, or all?

Once you figure out where you want to start, the next thing is to get all your assets together. Decide what you are going to use and how you are going to communicate. Because of web 2.0 technologies, you can now write, put up pictures, upload videos, be an amateur radio jockey and do podcasts, as well as hone your maternal instincts by helping out people and making new contacts.

The best and easiest way to include video to your portfolio is to create a YouTube id. If you have a firewire port and a video camera you're in good shape. If not, start by shooting video clips with your point and shoot camera and upload that to YouTube. It's 5 clicks and a couple of questions. A real breeze.

For pictures, there are a bunch of free sites out there that you can use. The most popular are Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. Snapfish is good too, but it is annoying in that it requires that users have a SnapFish id to see your pictures. This of course can be a good thing if you are only sharing pictures with a few trusted friends.

Podcasting is a lot easier now than you might think. For less than $100 you can buy a stereo mp3 recorder and record yourself. Mac users will have a snap of a time putting podcasts together with Garage band and iTunes. PC users might have to do a bit of manual work in getting the XML set up for the initial podcast. However, once you set yourself up, doing subsequent episodes is pretty easy. For podcasts and storing mp3 files, try imeem.com. It

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