Saturday, February 03, 2007

social networking tools

Thanks to Sarah for sending along this info from Learning Trends newsletter, published by the MASIE Center:

Ning - Build Your Own Social Network: I am impressed with a new and free Social Networking capacity building system, Ning. You can create your own social network, make it open or closed, and easily add/delete/create the features you desire. These can include forums, blogs, member data bases, You Tube type video and more. What is most interesting is their approach to an "Open Source" model. You can see and clone any development done by another Ning site. I would be interested in asking a number of our TRENDS readers to build course/class models on Ning. Access the site at http://www.ning.com and then send me a link to your site. We'll publish these in a future TRENDS. This is great example of Web 2.0 design.

It looks similar to what pbwiki and wetpaint are doing. I think this newsletter blurb is another great example of using existing tools, instead of building them, to get collaboration going on the web. I think I've already mentioned Nancy Pearl's book lust site. I think it's great! If only these SN tool-builder folks would let us (subscribers) host the tools ourselves - anyone know of anybody doing that?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I messed around with Ning awhile back; it does look like it has some potential. I believe, though, that it is all hosted on the Ning site, a la MySpace, so that the whole deal does social-up to itself. Not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind.

Another open-source social networking engine that I've been keeping an eye on is AROUNDMe from Barnraiser (PHP/SQL based). I haven't tried to download or install the source-code yet, as they haven't gotten up to version 1... but it looks pretty durn interesting. The publishers describe AROUNDMe as a "free shared knowledge networking and collaboration platform... accompanied by... Group, Event, Blog and Wiki modules."

Possibly a WordPress for social engines? That would be awesome.

Link here:

http://www.barnraiser.org/software.php

chrystie said...

thanks! agreed. that would rock. (nice to meet you at ALA-MW andy)

Anonymous said...

I am using ning.com for my social networking activities. I found it as a tool which had been primarily designed for social interaction and sharing. You can gain lots of friends and build reputation over the net.

Anand Kumar said...

Please visit http://www.engagein.com once.
EngageIn is a Social Networking website in which you can send free sms to any part in india. You can find friends, relatives on EngageIn. Youtube Upload. Jukebox and Music Download