17 March 2010, 6:43

Hi, Another thought here. Has anyone thought if mahara can be used to produce a clone for any of the big social professional networks out there? Can mahara be used as a base to make something like linkedin, Xing, Viadeo or Ryze?

If the answer is yes, What is mahara missing in terms of social networking features?

The reason i'm asking is that we are taking an attempt to create our own Social Business Networking site and investigating if mahara would be our system of choice to build this platform upon.

Regards,

-MA 

18 March 2010, 21:40

Hello Mahmoud,

      Yes, of course. I have been working on the platform to transform it into a business networking site. However, you don't want to create a clone of another Linkedin or popular site. You would need to take the platform and do something different with it. That's what we have been doing for the last three months. 

The features you would need to add is up to you but, here's a few ideas:

events, contact importer, more powerful search engine, and the list would continue.

You would need to spend some quality time to revise the functionality to mahara. We're actually going to introduce some new features to business social networking that isn't available at other popular sites.  We're actually partnering up with other major sites like google, yahoo, ask, skype,twitter, and many more. I am just sharing this information with you to give you and idea of what can be done. 

I wish I could share more with you but, giving our idea away wouldn't be smart for us. There is a market for sites that cater to business professionals if done correctly. 

Also you could use any platform to build a business networking site. With mahara you have to remember that it was built for institutions and schools. A lot of work is required and I know this from experience. If you have any more questions I could be happy to answer them for you.

I am sure you have heard about joomla. That is a great cms and dailystrength.org was built on this.  I have used this site a few times in the past and it's a descent site. Not trying to take away from mahara or anything. But, it may save you some time in the long run depending on your goals for a business networking site. We ran joomla for awhile but, found mahara and we changed over. 

Cheers:)

21 March 2010, 17:18

Well, Thanks allan for the insight. It seems we are in the same business. We are coming from the Recruitment industry and wish to create a network that caters to the recruitment in general as well as our specialization in IT recruitment. So far our experiance shows that modifying mahara and adding functionality to it is relativly easy. We are also connecting it to several external systems to aid in the recruitment tasks we are looking to create.

What concerns me is that mahara is really built to cater for the Learning industry and as such is not very good on the social networking side. It lacks the contact importer for instance and we intend to give it back to the community once we have it done and well tested. However it would be nice to chat more about this.

 My email is ma(at)meait.com, and my skype id is mabdalla.

Would be great to chat about this since i'm very interested in Social Networking for business.

 Regards,

-MA

26 March 2010, 11:18

Yes it's very easy to modify the core code for mahara. Again you also made a good point that mahara is centered around the learning industry. When I said it's a lot of work I was meaning to get new functionality to the mahara system. Mahara provides on thing that normal business networking sites don't, views. Users can create unlimited views which that's one function that caught my eye.

A view can work for anyone in anyfield and they have full control. Another downside to mahara is user friendliness in my opinion. We have fixed that by breaking the menu into several different menus. What I mean is explaind below.

The main menu now shows the following:

Home, Profile, Friends,  Groups,  My Portfolio, and More

All submenus are connected to the appropiate main menu item.

We added another menu that shows the following:

Notifications, Settings, Help, and Logout

If they are an admin or institution admin the following is displayed

06 April 2010, 2:20

We are using Mahara as the base code for our business social networking site (not a "clone" however), though we have modified the core extensively and have added many, many more features.

To list what's missing really depends on what you want to offer on your site.  For example, we added a microblog/activity stream (similar to Facebook's news feed).   We also completely rewrote the user-to-user message handling. Those are just two of the dozens of additions and changes we have done.

When we first started, we looked at numerous open-source packages, but unfortunately none of them really offered a complete solution. Mahara offered some unique features that other packages didn't, so we decided to go with it.

At this time, we have a team of backend developers and UI designers, management, legal council, etc. We hope to launch our Series A round of funding within 60 days.  Thankfully, our attorney is very experienced with tech startups and is a partner in a large national firm.

So, it can be done, but it requires a LOT of work no matter what you start with, whether it's an open-source package or from scratch.