Hi, Ping

houstonlively is a blog-jacker from houston .... and that's exactly what he's done to your blog! You're supposed to also do wink, wink when you respond to him, and then he'll leave you alone.

In my case, I settled on Dolphin from a combination of the 'make-or-buy' reasons and the purely Dolphin reasons:

1 - Full suite of features.

2 - Open source: so I can customise it however I wish down the track.

3 - 'Try before you buy' through the free version (Though I have paid, ad-free see more versions myself because I want to be able to control all the content on my site, plus -- being a knowledge worker myself -- I do believe in compensating Boonex for its work.)

4 - Much, much cheaper than developing one from the ground up (even when factoring in all the additional costs involved to fix bugs and pay for additional mods). But the largest cost savings is in my own time: the opportunity costs for the time for developing a spec from the ground up and for project management time to shepherd the project through. Apart from forestalling stress ... and potentially a heart attack as well!

5 - Much, much shorter production cycle than developing one from scratch. I can 'go to market' much more quickly.

I am totally, totally sold on WordPress (easy for a non-techie to get into; robust and solid -- releases are not bug-infested like Dolphin so far; stable; availability of support -- plugins and templates -- from just about every corner of the galaxy; the modular architecture is brilliant; etc).

But WP is not a social networking tool, and BuddyPress still has quite a bit to go before it can offer the same features that are already in Dolphin.

I have looked at a few other social networking tools but they tended to come short in relation to #1, #2 and #3 vis-a-vis Dolphin, though they did seem more robust/solid products and the support more professional. Have not done an exhaustive research by any means, so I'm sure I've missed many other options. But I'm quite comfortable that I'm right on with Dolphin.

I'm not a solid techie person; more like a content person. So tech support is going to be crucial in order to make Dolphin work for me. But I'm prepared to pay for this ... and coupled with Dolphin being open source, I think I should be able to manage the risks.