There is a great race for developing social networking applications with Drupal! The craze for social media is understandable given a situation where all business houses are looking at social networking sites as a powerful marketing tool. Social networks (SM) are a place where commercial organizations and their consumers communicate directly; this platform makes SM a buzz in company boardrooms. With this realization comes another trend to offer social media friendly websites to end users. Drupal SM applications are the most popular among them as they are not only the best for creating attractive websites but also enable cool features.

Advantages of the social networking application with Drupal:The advantages of making SM applications on the Drupal platform are mentioned below:

• Drupal is a complete content management system, which comes with separate authoring tools for blogs, forums, profiles, and wikis. This provides an ideal platform for interactions.
• Drupal is an open source platform. This feature makes it easier for anyone to access codes for free and change them. You can make huge profits by creating a community of developers and users, so they can exchange their thoughts and views.
• Drupal is an ideal hosting platform, which is scalable. Drupal can run large and heavy websites easily. Thus, you can add newsletters, images, video files, articles, forums, etc. to your website to attract a larger community.
• Drupal is SEO friendly. If your motto is to drive more traffic to your website, Drupal is the best scenario for you. Drupal has a number of SEO friendly features such as page title, URL, meta tags, etc. to catch the fancy of search engines. You can also integrate Google Analytics into your website to track the status of your website.
• Drupal content is highly editable. Drupal has all the options to Add, Edit, and Change Content, so you can make changes to your content to meet social media requirements. To do this, you would not need any extensive skills.

Disadvantage of social networking application with Drupal: Many web developers still feel that they tried to use the Drupal platform by leaving the conventional PHP programming method, simply because there are more configuration options in the Drupal CMS. They also find it difficult to learn Drupal’s vertical learning curve. There is very little room for newbies, as there is not a single document on difficult CMS hooks.

Some popular Drupal social networking applications:

Drupal Twitter application:This app gives Twitter notifications after every new post. Users can also use their own Twitter account to post updates. This feature is available for Drupal 5.x 6.x. This is a downloadable app.

Drupal App for Facebook:Drupal ‘fbstatus’ can easily get your current Facebook status. You can also control who can see your status on Facebook with this app. This is suitable for Drupal 5.x 6.x.