How can two people start a social networking site? where does one start?

This site was written by two people. They use Django.

Code.
Lots and lots of code.

I would recommend reading the essays here: http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

And the news on this site: http://news.ycombinator.com/

Don’t worry about building things the “right way”. Just build shit people want. And the chances are if you build something you want, there will be others that want to use it as well.

You could build a basic social networking site with barely any code. Then build from that. I’m not a fan of using open source stuff. Don’t like the idea of using other peoples code. But thats just me xD

Oh sites to look at if your a complete NOOB…

- w3schools (tutorials for many web languages)
– PHP
– MySQL
– jQuery

If you’re looking for something more service-based, rather than coding from scratch, try out Ning or Wordpress MU.