I want to make a social network.

I cant hire a dev team

then quit. To start a social networking site that will ever have any remote chance of gaining popularity, you need to have a team. I'm sorry. There is SO much to do. Programming, design, marketing, investing, servers, hardware. The people over at Facebook (thousands) are trained professionals that went to top notch schools to get where theyve gotten. Kid, GO TO COLLEGE FIRST. You will need MILLIONS of dollars of servers, or do you not even know what that means? If so, just quit.

Not trying to be a downer, but you don't stand a F* CHANCE. Oh, and can I guess you just watched the Social Network? No offense, but you aren't as smart as Mark Zuckerberg. Nor am I. Back then, what he had in mind didn't exist, so there was no competition. MySpace is different. He also had a rich friend. He was also a Harvard student (that's like saying he was also a genius).

Wow I started a social network. It is not easy. First and foremost you do need a team. You also have to decide what age group you are after. Next are funds. I have spent over a $1,000.00 for domain, hosting company, branding, and for a couple scripts, plus template.

This is not easy at all. Movies make things look so cool. They glamorize the process. But you think you will be up a few nights a week sorting through the site doing cool stuff. I admit some of it is cool, but not all of it.

Start checking out CMS's. Learn all you can about them, what makes them tick, and what they ARE capable of doing, plus what they lack. Be sure they have good spam control, and you understand how they run the site. Or else as soon as you hit a snag, the site will go down, and you won’t have a clue.

Hire a team that can bring something to the table that you need. Obvious you won’t be able to pay them, so finding them will be hard. I suggest hiring someone that has marketing experience, scripting/coding experience, CMS experience, plus someone that is a people person is great to have also. Incentive would be to make them part owner of the social network. Someone needs to be good writing out your privacy policy, how to, user agreement, plus handle twitter, LinkedIn, you have to link to these and use them because many of your members will come from them.

Biggest advice I can give you is keep a cool head, think before you act, don't try to make another digg, Facebook, MySpace, or twitter. You have to create something new, and not be a copycat. If your grabbing content from another website then you make sure you also have something on your website that is entirely created by your team or your members, or else Google will drop you before you even get started.

Keep an open mind, if something is not working out; be OK at making some changes. Don't make the changes if you have only been live a few months. The same can be said about your CMS setup, and scripts you decide to use. Not everyone will like the same stuff you like. So learn now to get along with your team. It is not just you running the website... It is your team. It takes years to really get established. Marketing is at top to your social network working, so is your will to succeed. Patience will help you to go far.

If you don't already know the answer to your question kid, then theres no real point in answering it... Start with a smaller project first. Not just anyone can create their own social media network

Like everyone else said, start small. Building an entire social network from scratch is a ton of work, even for someone who knows programming. I would recommend learning basic HTML, PHP, etc. Having a good foundation of this is key to any good website. Then start making small sites. Do it locally with something like XAMPP. Learn your way around MySQL and learning to debug PHP errors or Javascript errors gone wrong, You need a lot of knowledge, so take the time you have and start learning this stuff.

Well to start you've definetly got the right attitude and some basic server know how. Anyways I am like you young (13) and motivated to create a community site. I already have basic posting (like tweeting), messaging and friendship on my site. I personally am using PHP for my main language for functionality and obviously HTML and CSS for styling. I still only the know the rock bottom basics but find I am learning best by creating not by doing tutorials and reading. I highly recommend webintersect.com to start off with it has great basic site functionality (in PHP and JS) and is free to use. MAKE SURE you understand how the site works before making any of your own major changes as like mentioned above, if you try to make changes and you don't understand how they work you WILL have problems. The webintersect platform also has youtube tutorials on how the developer made all of the various parts, so you can re-create it yourself using these tutorials.

Well Facebook was done using PHP. So that might be the best way to go if you want to make a social network site. I wish you good luck however you will need more than just yourself to create an entire social network. If you are expecting a lot of traffic then you will need a good host.

Go with a CMS like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.; add some plugins/modules/extensions, and volia!

If you want to want it free for hosting use Heroku. There entry level hosting is free and will server good amount of request. That is if you are using something Ruby on Rails. You don't need a Collage degree to program.

I am a Ruby on Rails Dev myself and here are some pointers

1. Use Test Driven Development or TDD a. I would use RSpec
2. Use Version Controller (git) it will make your life easy with Heroku
3. As of posting of this answer, use Rails 3.1
4. Use New Relic to help track down issues
5. Make your know Authentication System
6. If you to have your uses upload photos use Amazons S3 Storage, It will be very fast scene Heroku uses Amazon's EC2
7. If the least six things don't make scene, don't make one.

Start it at the High School level, since your 14-15 wait until your Freshman year or so, see if anyone can help you.

I'm 15 and during the past few years I've created a fairly successful blog that gets about 50K views a month and is ranked 584,541 by Alexa. A blog really isn't a social network but the making of ZL Studios has really given me a lot of great experiences.

So I have to say start a smaller project that won't require a team or anything like that. Let the project grow and experiment with it. I learned a bunch of programming languages and other things just because I wanted to improve my website.

The experience you gain with the website should help you in the future with that social network. You can start it up maybe during or after college when you have a bit more experience. And you can also take classes in school to help you with your website and that kind of stuff. And you can even put ads on your website to make a little bit more money and use that money to hire a team in the future for your social network.