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House Hunting: Social Networks

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In my quest to find a Web 2.0 tool to share, I kept in mind our homeless tribe. With that in mind, I went out "house" hunting to find a "house" that was free and open in architecture. What I mean by open architecture is a system that provides multiple functions to meet our current needs and is able to grow with us in the future. I know we mentioned Ning in the past, so I started there and will be the focus of this post.

Ning lets you create your own social network and offers many features like: blogs, videos, wikis, events, music, rss, chat and more. I really liked the all in one feel and not having to go to separate sites to post to a blog or watch a video. The all in one feel and many features provide a good structure for the "house" and the strategies implemented will make it "livable."

I also found it was very easy to create and administer a Ning social network. You can check out the test Ning social network I created at: http://ksdlohana.ning.com.

On a side note, I also found an open source social networking solution at: http://grou.ps/introduction.php?f=1&from=footer&g=tpl_socialbeans. I started to build a social network using this site, but ended up using Ning. You can see this social network at: http://grou.ps/ksdl.

Comments

Komarey said…
Mahalo Clinton for sharing. I've seen a lot of Ning sites and I do agree that they have a lot of flexibility and the convenience of housing the basic elements of social networking. It's easy to follow and follows the same basic structure as most sites do. It's easy to join other networks as well. I do like the look and feel of it as well. The feeds page is clean and easy to scan. I hope this house will fit our needs as we grow and build our tribe. Thanks for doing the research.
September 9, 2009 at 2:48 PM
Dorothy said…
Great owau topic. I'm a part of a few other Ning sites, but haven't really participated actively as a Ning member. I think the features of being able to pull in RSS, videos, photos, chat, etc. would be a plus as we begin looking at various strategies to keep our tribe members connected. Mahalo Clinton for sharing.
September 10, 2009 at 9:51 AM
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