Hey guys,
I am trying to make an online community but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas first.

My idea is to make a chat website but I was wondering is it hard to build a chat website and to maintain a community with people actually coming to it?

Are you reffering to chat as Social Networking like MySpace or Facebook or an actual chat service?

Either option can be risky and I would recommend protection as with teens, parents and crime law suits are plentiful if not maintained or you get too big.

While Social Networking is fun to develop, there are too many other there. With scripts provided such as Boonex Dolphin Community or Joomla and Joomunity or Jomsocial.

New ideas or niches for a certain industry / hobby may be a good bet.

Good luck!

If you are going to make a site that offers chat rooms to the community, I'd think long about it first, and see if you can come with an idea that is slightly different from all the other related sites that are already out there.

Even FriendFeed, which is really popular, took a different angle on chat rooms, by weaving in other social networking features.

www.ning.com

Don't reinvent the wheel - it's all right there, and it's completely free (ad supported - a few bucks/month to remove ads)

Blogs, threads, chat, file share, groups, events, pictures, videos...we use Ning for a number of our products and services, especially for user groups, etc. Just an amazing set of tools. Sometimes a the server response is a little slow, but as I said, we use it in a corporate environment and it's been great!

Best luck to you!
Steve

Originally Posted by BlueAltitude

Hey guys,
I am trying to make an online community but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas first.

My idea is to make a chat website but I was wondering is it hard to build a chat website and to maintain a community with people actually coming to it?

For me its so hard to maintain a chatsite first you need the availability of all the members, then I suggest its better to have a forum compare with chat website.