Why run your own social network?

• For organisations concerned about their data but still wanting to harness the power of social network, you can.
• The ability to customize and brand your network exactly how you want.
• Connect together networks to create a truly distributed, global network of sites - the way the Internet should be!
• You can develop specific functionality to suit your needs
• Transparent development process
• If required, harness targeted advertising
• Even thought MySpace is too big to be useful? Create specialised, targeted networks instead!

An Example user - The University of brighton

Install size: 36,000 users

"We have Elgg running campus-wide with 36000 users registered. The flexibility of the Elgg model made it easy to integrate with our institutional VLE and MIS systems so we can use the same automated procedures to register students and course communities for all our systems. Our students took to using Elgg immediately and within two weeks we had a thriving and interesting blogging community. What's more rewarding is the manner of use rather than simply the scale of use - students and staff are using it both as an online social community and for shared academic interest. Elgg is now being used formally within course and modules and less formally to bring together people with similar interests - enabling people to share information, reflections and comment across course boundaries and develop something very different to anything we've had before. I firmly believe we're taking the first steps from a Virtual Learning Environment to a Shared Learning Environment."

Dr Stan Stanier, Learning Technologies Director, The University of Brighton