There is a competitor to Ning: CrowdVine. However, it seems to be marketing primarily to conference and expo organizers at the moment.
Also, this old PC in the den has gotten slow again, even with AVG installed. Now I’m considering switching it back to bloody Ubuntu (again).
EDIT: more competition:
Has anyone tried Ning yet?
I started using it around Monday/Tuesday night. It’s a “social network hosting service” (SNHS), where one can create his or her own little MySpace for free. It’s not that flexible in its social network management tools (feels alot like creating your first Geocities or Tripod website), but I haven’t heard of any competitors to Ning yet, which may be why Ning doesn’t feel all that professional.
However, while it is a bit late in the social networking boom to make a prediction, I think that Ning, as probably the first SNHS, could start a trend will redefine how we’ve long conceived of social networks as only being stand-alone services that can only appeal to the most financially-lucrative demographic.
Also, since the most generalized social networks tend to provide the ability to create interest-specfifc e-groups for free from within the network, what does this mean for the e-group if the social networks can now be created for free and for specfifc interests within the SNHS? Does this mean that the e-group become irrelevant, or does this mean that e-groups are now free to explore more specfic, more exclusive interests than those which would be allowed in a general SN like MySpace or Facebook?
Finally, what if Ning could be replicated in the 3d virtual world business? What if virtual world social networks can be created for free from within a virtual world network hosting service (VWNHS)? Virtual worlds like Second Life and IMVU already possess a few (but not most) of the trappings of a social network like MySpace and Facebook, namely, in-world e-groups, chat and messages.
Unfortunately, such may not occur for as long as development of virtual world social networks and models (a la Second Life or Kaneva) remains as prohibitevly expensive as it is right now. Lack of adoption of cross-platform standardization also results in unnecessary reinvention of wheels in this regard.
Otherwise, this one furry-oriented virtual world that was started in 2004 may have enjoyed some of the benefits and usage that has gone to the larger virtual worlds rather than shut down due to lack of attention and input.
First you had profiles, then you had groups. Most social networks on the WWW are centered around these two components of the user experience. Multimedia posted through the user’s account are seen and reviewed by other users via their accounts, and the better, more pertinent ones are featured within multimedia “pools” maintained by groups, which are user-created, user-sustained mini-communities which are devoted to a particular subject or demographic.
However, the most bleeding-edge concept in social networking is the “place” or “island”, which are user- or group-created pseudogeographical positions which are fixed to a specific “area” of the world within the network.
As stated, these may be created by either single users or by whole groups, and could even serve more than one group during the lifetime of the “place”.
At current, the social network which has best incorporated the concept of “places”, and has probably marketed it to the furthest extents in recent years, is Second Life. The closest WWW-based equivalent to the social networking “place” is Wikipedia’s articles, which are designed to appeal to a specific subject within the online encyclopedia, but can be maintained and sustained by more than one group (or “WikiProject”) which all have vested interests in the contents thereof.
Thus, can the “places” idea be successfully brought to the WWW-based social networks of present? What kind of political arrangements could evolve out of the addition of a new tier to the social networking mores of MySpace, Tribe.net, Facebook or LiveJournal?
Finally, what technological advancements could accompany the development of “places” within these social networks? Could newer applications of the ubiquitous RSS feed (which is already used extensively for both personal and group productions) find a niche to fill in the “places” idea?
EDIT.
A few ideas for RSS updates+Places:
