From time to time, the Joomla community is rocked by cleverly studied marketing operations devised to reap some quick profit out of hype, fads and misinformation. I don't know how about you, but personally I don't like to be fooled. The bottom line is to confirm through first hand experience that deeds are not worth the fancy layouts used to promote them.

Community Builder (CB) has been until now the undisputed social network engine to build user contributed portals on Joomla. After carefully examining the new kid in town, Azrul's Jomsocial, my verdict is that CB still remains where it was. Ruling for ages to come.

Jomsocial, like most property extensions, promises a lot more than it delivers. Besides the unclear licensing and the money rip-off, it is a technical flop. A downgraded version of CB 1.2 with fancier default icons and a plethora of vulgar tools one can find anywhere. The standard set of options brings no novelty whatsoever.

In the frontend UI, you can create a user account, bug / beg friends to opt-in, launch groups, add notes to a feed, images... Guess you get the idea. Don't expect a "Web 2.0" ajaxy experience at all. Just like CB, Jomsocial loads the entire page from action to action. Also, in the trail of CB, it allows for integration of 3rd party plugins, conveniently renamed after "Applications" so that it sounds more appealing. An obvious tribute to Facebook here.

Differences with CB emerge where it hurts both end consumers and deployers the most. That's right, our pockets. The standard edition is set to cost 99 USD, whereas the Pro Edition will be sold at a retail price of 149 USD. What is worst, though the API to integrate plugins is open, the core engine is not. A sure bummer for coders who might need to tweak, enhance or even fork the very workflow of the extension.

To sum things up. Jomsocial is not worth a penny for the following reasons:

• There's CB, a solid piece of software under constant improvement. It's GPL, open source, free (these concepts are closely related, but nevertheless distinct), pluggable, widely supported by and connected to the most prominent Joomla extensions.
• Jomsocial is too focused on all the nagging and more trivial bits of a social network, whilst overlooking features CB already got from 3rd party ACL layers like APC (now defunct) and PROMA. I was delighted to find out that Joomsocial offers Admins  the "outstanding" possibility to "add any number of custom fields, or not have any at all. No custom field is forced down your throat" (!!!) Wow, neato, eh fellas! Hmmm, hold on... isn't this one of the oldest and most elemental features built in CB almost since the beginning of time? Riiighhttt.... No word is said, however, about the real juice: profile types and specific field sets for each.
• Apart from the "Recent Activities" feed to let your friends know you are burping, walking the dog or off to the toilet, there's absolutely nothing in Jomsocial to look for (that cannot be found in CB). It's not even close to the major social networks notification systems it tries to imitate
• Jomsocial is based on a restrictive 1 license = 1 domain model.

To be fully fair with Azrul, they have developed a couple of interesting commercial extensions, namely JomComment and MyBlog. Their licensing policy is not the most "disregardful" of the OSM statement on voluntary GPL compliance out there. At least no stupid code obfuscators are used. My issue with Jomsocial is more technical than legal, so to speak. It adds virtually nothing to CB. If social networking on Joomla concerns you, i'd suggest donating to CB or purchasing a subscription plan.