Build Your Own Social Network Ning is one of several Social Networking sites that is allowing users to create their own social network. I’ve been using Elgg for some time, on the Elgg.net site – now called “Eduspaces” – which reflects the number of Educational users. I’ve also set up a space on Elgg Spaces, for students I have who are not doing Educational Technology.
Looking at Ning, they already have quite a few Spaces tagged with “Education“. I’ve had a bit of a browse round Ning. One feature that could be useful (though the security issues worry me a little) is the ability to import your address book, when it can tell you who in your address book is also using Ning. I’m not sure I’d like to use it to send my user name & password; I’d rather export the address book as a file & import it. I have more control that way.
It’s got messaging – which Elgg has just introduced, and it’s got a community forum – again, something that Elgg now has with the forum view of a community blog. I’ve had a look through the forum on the Library2.0 space, and, as far as I can tell, the forum is like the Elgg fora, in that the top post is the most recent to be started, rather than the most recent to be commented on, as is more common in most fora.
It does have a chat client, which Elgg doesn’t have.
There are some features of Elgg which Ning doesn’t have. I’ve just found on Elgg “Presentations”. I’ve yet to find someone who has created one, but, from looking at them, it’s not just the ability to upload Powerpoint (which could be done through the file upload anyway) – so I’m looking forward to seeing one when someone’s created one.
Another offshoot of Elgg, that I’m currently trying to get my head round, is “Explode” This, unlike other sites, doesn’t have blogs itself – rather it lets you link create a profile and link to your blog – wherever it’s hosted. I think that thing that slightly confused me, was that I was hoping that it would import friends lists from places like Elgg, though it seems not. I also haven’t quite worked out how to add friends that haven’t yet joined Explode. Or maybe I can’t.
(I’ve also just read about Spangy, but the home page for people of my age was just way to busy and crowded for me. )
Hi there,
Ben has created a small presentation about the history of Elgg development using the presentation tool.
http://elgg.net/bwerdmuller/presentations/1/clean
You may have seen it while you were there and it may be a bit peripheral to your interests, but just in case:
http://library20.ning.com/
I’m not sure I’m entirely “into” yet, however!
Dave, I’ve had a look – thanks. I’m a little confused as to how it would be used as a presentation – as it’s not in “screen sized” bites – but I could see uses in collecting together key blog posts.
However, perhaps the “screen sized bites” is a symptom of over exposure to Powerpoint!
I also see that the forum view of a community blog now seems to be sorted by date of last comment, not date of first post, so that’s good 🙂
Tim:
I’ve had a look at the Library2.0 space – it’s the one that I linked to when talking about Forums, though re-reading it, it’s not clear if it’s an Elgg or a Ning space.
I’ve also had comment in a second life post , about 21Publish … Marcel should have found this post!
broken link spangy
Thank you very much, Paul.
[Note to self … remember the http when entering URLs!]