A friend and client of mine asked me about SNEmpire today. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but a quick Google I discovered it’s a $500 social networking script. The sales page actually looks pretty good, but I went to one of the sites running the software (imsocialize.com) and was less than impressed by the user interface presented there.

Instead of recommending a buy, I pointed my friend to several open source social networking scripts that might server her needs:

Dolphin
The demo site and the showcase of sites running this script are very impressive.

Elgg
This looks like another contender. It’s got a pretty basic interface, but from a user standpoint, the simplicity is great.

Mahara
Mahara is a little less like Facebook, and a little more like LinkedIn. If your users are all about business and achievements, this might be the best solution for you.

Insoshi
A bit basic, but like Elgg, it’s got lots of potential.

PHPizabi
A great looking site right out of the box.

While each of these will require some customization, and they don’t come with tutorials, and maybe that makes all the difference to my friend. But making sure the foundation of my business — the software — is rock solid would be more important to me than spending time on the customization and learning curve were I planning a social networking site.

As the end of August approaches I suddenly realized I’ve been terribly negligent about this blog for the entire month. But bringing myself to blog while the weather is still warm and the days are still long seemed to be just a little short of impossible.

But before the month is up, I want to point you to a few products.

First, The Wealthy Blogger has posted that he’s raising the price of his very cool Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for Wordpress in a few days in order to start his affiliate program. If you want to grab it at $14.99, do it now!

Secondly, if you haven’t yet seen Market Samurai, you ought to give the trial a run. It is a very, very nice piece of market and niche analysis software for the price.

Neither product is linked here with an affiliate link. They get the nod on their own merits.

I’m giving away 100 Entrecard Credits to the first 50 EC users who send me a secret code….

All you have to do is click this link to subscribe to my Google Links, then do a Google.com search for
Hello Mindsurfer to see the code and instructions.

I have been checking out some of the preseason videos for The 30 Day Challenge, and today was a particularly intriguing one. Check out this video about Google Subscribed Links.

Coincidentally, I have been asked to test out a product that could really help with this. I hope I’ll have permission to let you know about it in the next day or two.

In the meantime, why not subscribe to the Surf the Mind Subscribed Links feature!

Once you’ve subscribed, check out how it works by clicking this link. Or how about this one. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an image-highlighted link for every major product launch? Pretty exciting stuff.

I found this list via Yahoo’s web services today, and thought it was interesting. It’s a valuable peek at the most frequently used tags for web pages. If you’re marketing a site via social media, or looking for a niche broad enough to provide blogging fodder for a few years, it is a neat way to see what the most frequently bookmarked ‘topics’ are.

1. video
2. videos
3. movies
4. photos
5. movie
6. hot
7. blogger
8. young
9. music
10. reference
11. blog
12. travel
13. fun
14. free
15. business
16. software
17. technology
18. design
19. tv
20. sports
21. howto
22. tools
23. blogs
24. money
25. humor
26. science
27. search
28. imported
29. google
30. art
31. funny
32. home
33. tech
34. linux
35. mobile
36. computer
37. photography
38. apple
39. mp3
40. programming
41. cool
42. photo
43. dvd
44. politics
45. food
46. finance
47. education
48. rss
49. vacation
50. information

Interesting to note that four out of the first five are video related. This could possibly mean that users are more likely to tag interesting videos than interesting text content online.