With all the buzz over the last few years about social networking, a niche seems to have opened up amongst vendors pitching to let anyone create their own Facebook or MySpace. Ning and Webjam are already in the space; now SocialGO, a fresh effort out of the UK, is aiming to take them on. SocialGO is being launched for Lara Croft and Tiger Woods DVD game maker Bright Things by Alex Halliday, the merely 22-year-old developer who says he has a team of 11 working on the project.

And the beta is very much a developer’s project, less slick than Ning as yet, though the pitch says it has “an ambition to take on Ning”. What’s the business model? Free to start, with the addition later of a £9.99-a-month premium package offering video chat, 5Gb storage, 50Gb bandwidth and no ads - similar to its bigger counterpart, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andressen. Somehow, for a site that only entered open beta yesterday, it already claims 1,000 networks on-site. Same question for SocialGO as to the others - do users really want to sign up to yet another network, or would they rather use the group functions already built in to supersites like Facebook?