Tag Archives: walled garden

by Michelle Lentz

It’s a day for numbers, I suppose. Earlier today, someone created the 1 millionth social network on Ning. Ning is the “build your own social network” site started by Marc Andreesen over two years ago. C|Net’s numbers state that “Ning has 22 million registered users, about 6.1 million of whom are considered active. Out of the million networks, about a fifth are currently active.” (I suspect people build networks as experiments, but don’t act on them.)

This makes me happy. Ning has made my life infinitely easier. I run a non-profit on the side and creating a social network on Ning was our best bet for a web site. It kept me from having to spend time coding and designing and instead, I could dive more into the content. Over the last year, our Ning site has improved because the offerings from Ning have improved as well. For my non-profit, I literally am running a mini-Facebook.

The same applies to the rather impressive Open Wine Consortium, of which I’m a member, and many of the other niche social networks on Ning. I love the way Ning allows people to gather together around a single subject. Alternatively, it also works as a basic web site for our family site – pulling in RSS feeds, photos, videos, and more. I’m debating on moving my main business web site to Ning, because the tech support is excellent and the features are better than what I could feasibly build on my own.

So congratulations to Ning – 1 million networks strong.

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

Facebook is making changes all over the place. Let’s start with your personal profile page, which will see some changes in the very near future.

As a user, you will now have more control over what you see. You can institute filters (right-hand side) and choose not to see stories from that high school acquaintance you barely remember, but see more stories from family members. You’ll also be able to see what’s happening on your favorite Fan pages right within your stream. You can currently tour the upcoming changes.

Now, if you happen to own a “Fan Page” or brand profile, those pages are changing as well. They’ll now have all the same options as a personal profile page. As far as I can tell, the huge advantage to this is that your fans will now see your updates in their own stream. Yesterday, a number of big name brands went live with their pages, including U2.

You can see the new use of tabs, as well as the Stream tab. There is also a publisher option, which includes status updates for your Fan Page. Soon, the brand profiles will also have the ability to have more than 5,000 friends. You can add tabs to your brand profile. For instance, I added Events, Photos, and Discussion tabs to a non-profit page I run. Updates are becoming real-time, as Facebook is also speeding up the information that fills everyone’s news feeds.

In the past, someone would join a Fan page, but that was often the end of the interaction. With the new ability to have Fan Page activities streamed into a live feed, marketers have a new and authentic way to communicate with, well, Fans. According to Facebook, “Facebook users can easily make connections, comment on posted content and join the online conversations with the famous via their public profiles – just as they can with a family member, friend or colleague.”  Hmm … that sounds very Twitter-like to me.

Public (Fan Page) changes aren’t live yet, but you can go ahead and implement the changes in your own brand profile if you have one. If not, Facebook will make the changes for you in the near future.

__

Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net