How Much does it Cost to Create an MySpace Clone?

In order to create a clone of the social network MySpace - a platform with identical functionality and similar design - it will take from 28 to 170 thousand dollars, depending on the complexity, design, functionality and country of the technical partner. In this article, we will tell you what factors affect the cost of creating a platform and what stages the development process consists of.

Business strategy of the project

As with launching any business project or application, building a social network like MySpace starts with defining a concept. You must clearly understand which platform you are creating and for which audience. The concept can be developed independently, which is quite difficult and requires specialized knowledge and skills, or it can be entrusted to a business analytics company or a full-cycle development company such as Merehead.

When defining the concept, you need to:

1. Make a detailed marketing analysis to understand how your project can solve the problem / task of users, how it can be done best. This can be done through research, surveys, focus groups, statistics and analysis of competitors' applications.
2. Analyze your target audience. Define portraits of your audience taking into account demographics, behavioral patterns, needs, pains, etc. Create a value proposition and a few key user personalities to target at.
3. Create a development strategy. It involves the development of an overall product concept with a full set of desired characteristics, the formation of a vision of potential growth in terms of audience and income, as well as the creation of the SoW (technical task) and technical specification of the MySpace clone.
4. Creation of mockups and prototypes. A mockup is a static visualization of a product design with a medium to high level of accuracy, which helps to choose the right color scheme, develop frames, etc. A prototype is an interactive visualization of a project that fully reflects the desired design and functionality of a social network.
5. Group focus testing. It helps to understand whether the target audience likes your concept (being on paper in the form of mockups and prototypes).

Once you have a business strategy and a graphical representation of your future product, you can start implementing your clone in code.

MySpace clone functionality

To start developing a clone, you must first decide on the desired feature set. Here is a list of what should be on a social network regardless of its type, niche and target audience:

Registration, login. Usually, the ability to create a user profile is realized via email, phone number or account on Google, Facebook and Twitter. Some social networks focused on anonymity simply ask you to come up with a login (username) and password.

User profiles. In addition to the standard things, such as the ability to enter first and last name, location, education, preferences, friends, etc., you can also implement deeper profile customization. For example, Facebook has a 71 gender selection feature, which indicates a careful approach to the needs of its users.

News feed. When implementing this feature in your MySpace clone, it is advisable to use machine learning to prioritize the display of posts and comments in the user's feed, like in Facebook. This will help increase user loyalty and engagement.

Messaging. Facebook users send more than 20 billion messages every month, which indicates the great importance of this function. When implementing it, we recommend not just copying this functionality from MySpace, but adding some additional features to it, for example, sorting messages by importance, favorite contacts (whose messages will always be at the top), masks (like in Snapchat).

Content publishing. This is the ability to create, comment and share posts and content. MySpace relies on images and audio, since it’s a platform for creatives. But while creating your social network, you can bet on videos or an advanced text editor that will allow you to write articles and repost fragments of someone's text, as well as comment on them.

Search system, filters. Give users the ability to search for people, groups, posts, events, organizations and more by keywords using filters such as purpose (people, posts, news), place, date, content type (text, photo, video), etc. Such filters allow you to increase the relevance of search results, which increases the engagement of people.

Like, share. These are simple things that motivate users to publish their content and interact with each other in seemingly simple yet effective ways.

Geolocation. Geolocation is actively used on apps like TripAdvisor, Instagram, Facebook, Yelp and many other social networks. Users love this feature because it allows you to share your location, search for something or someone nearby. You also need this function for monetization - the ability to target advertising by user location.

Pop-up notifications. People need to be informed about everything important that happens to their profiles. In this case, the importance of information should be determined by the users themselves in the settings panel of push notifications.

Development of UI / UX website design

Having ready-made mockups and prototypes on hands, your technical partner can start developing the UI and UX of your social network. To avoid common errors associated with the design of social networks, follow these recommendations:

• UI: simple and pleasant colors, attractive layout, bright icons and call-to-action buttons, consistency of interface colors, the chosen color scheme should evoke certain emotions in users.
• UX: convenient and understandable navigation, sufficient functionality of the application, a minimum of distractions (ads, pop-ups and notifications, automatic content playback, etc.) and general thoughtfulness of the information architecture.

Finally, keep in mind that MySpace has lost its lead on social media due to far too big number of ads and an ill-conceived approach to user customization of the platform interface.

Social network technology stack

Choosing the right technology stack for developing a social network usually depends on its niche, functionality, complexity, technical requirements and the developer company. Here are the most popular back-end options for a social network like MySpace:

• Programming languages: Java, PHP, Python.
• SQL databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MS SQL, Oracle.
• NoSQL databases: MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB.
• Search systems: Apache Solr, Elasticsearch.
• Frameworks / Libraries: Spring stack for Java Laravel, Symfony for PHP Django, Flask, Tornado for Python.
• Front-end frameworks and technologies: React.js, Vue.js, Angular.
• Interface programming languages: TypeScript, JavaScript.
• DevOps: GitLab CI, TeamCity, GoCD Jenkins, WS CodeBuild, Terraform.
• Caching: Redis, Memcached.

This is what is commonly used when creating a social network mobile application:

• Languages: Swift and Objective-C for iOS, Java and Kotlin for Android.
• Architechture: MVVM for Android and MVC, MVP, MVVM and VIPER for iOS.
• IDE: Android Studio and Xcode for iOS.
• SDK: Android SDK and iOS SDK.

Back-end development of a MySpace clone

If you want the social network you created to work smoothly and not alienate users due to technical nuances, it is important to consider the following aspects when developing your social network backend:

Correct rendering:

• Server Side Rendering (SSR). This is a static approach for rendering website content, which is suitable for blogs and text-oriented social media sites as it can slow down page loading by a couple of seconds. Performed by backend developers with or without HTML / CSS coders, Spring, Velocity library, or other Java technologies.
• Client Side Rendering (CSR). More suitable for sites like MySpace or Facebook where is needed instant content rendering. Performed by front-end developers and typically implemented in JavaScript using React.js, AngularJS, or Vue.js.

Increasing security:

• Prevention of SQL injection. Make sure you placed a secure Java database driver with prepared statements function that sends request and data to the database server separately, avoiding such an attack to interfere with records inside the database.
• Protection against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Encrypt your data output or consider integrating input data filtering on arrival to protect yourself from XSS attacks on your MySpace clone.
• Secure hosting. To ensure your users' data is properly protected and not lost due to various problems (like MySpace in 2019), choose reliable hosting providers: AWS, A2 Hosting, HostGator.
• Data encryption. SSL is considered one of the most effective and mandatory security measures. This technology prevents your users' confidential data from being stolen during transmission.

Increasing productivity:

• Content Delivery Network. If your social platform is not targeting a single geographic region, but the whole world, then you need to improve the performance of your site with a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
• Optimization of content size. Also, to optimize the site, you may need a solution that compresses audio, video, text and other types of files for faster transmission to the user and reducing storage space on servers. For example, you can use the Gzip program, which provides static and dynamic compression / decompression of files.

Platform fault tolerance:

• integrate reliable communication channels that ensure safe and consistent communication and reduce the risk of loss of connection;
• enable clustering - a process that helps replicate server actions in the event of a sudden outage;
• make sure you have a fault-tolerant database that will take over the work of the main one in case of its failure;
• provide the back up of your database to eliminate the possibility of losing confidential data;
• provide fallback recovery procedures.

Software Testing

Functional testing. Provides an opportunity to make sure that all the functionality of the MySpace clone works according to the specification. This testing is carried out by the QA team. Here is what this check gives:

• all functions of the social network are tested:
• the compatibility of various functional modules is checked;
• the interface is checked for compliance with user expectations.

Security testing. Helps ensure that the platform does not contain any security vulnerabilities that could disrupt the website or leak sensitive user data. Security testers focus on the following areas:

• weaknesses in software components;
• vulnerabilities during network scanning;
• checking access points.

Performance testing. The readiness to withstand the possible load on the site is checked by testing:

• website connection speed;
• behavior under conditions of increasing load;
• behavior beyond the expected workload;
• behavior under constant heavy load.

Interface testing. This check helps to ensure the proper transmission of data from the server and client side rendering. To do this, the QA team carries out the following actions:

• checking the correctness of interaction between applications and server interfaces;
• checking the correct communication between the web server and the database server interfaces.

Usability testing. It checks if there are any weak points in the client side of the website, for example:

• the ability of the user to complete all his tasks:
• time spent by the user to complete the task;
• general view of the structure;
• completeness of navigation.

Release and promotion of your project

To prevent possible risks associated with the deployment of your social network, it is advisable to check:

• the correct operation of all URL-addresses.
• availability of a backup copy of your platform:
• site optimization for browser and mobile devices;
• HTML / CSS code security.

Additional aspects contributing to a successful launch could be:

• parsing URLs to make sure they are understandable to search engines;
• setting up Google Analytics for further monitoring.
• implementation of effective SEO practices.

Once your social network is ready to launch, it's time to implement a marketing strategy to promote your website. It can include:

• promotion with the help of popular influencers;
• advertising on, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Snapchat and Quora;
• creating viral content on your site;
• advertising on television, radio, in the media.

Cost of creating a MySpace clone

The cost of creating your own clone depends on two factors: the time it takes to develop the site and the hourly rate of the developers. This is how long it can take to develop an MVP and a complete product.

The average developer hourly rate mainly depends on the developer's country. This is how much it will cost to develop an MVP and a full-fledged MySpace clone product in the US, Western and Eastern Europe.