I chanced on Ning, a commercial platform for supporting social networks, albeit with at least one free option.
One of the founders of Ning is Marc Andreessen, the original founder of Netscape (the first "proper" browser, which Microsoft tried hard to destroy, but which now lives again as Firefox). The other is Gina Bianchini who has had a more conventional, though stellar, business career.
The Ning for business page , and the FAQ area are good places to begin assessing Ning. The former gives you a clear sense of prices and of the underlying business model. It also starts with the disarming:
"Depending on your needs, we may be a great option for you. If not, we're happy to recommend some other companies that may be a better fit."
The Ning entry on Wikipedia is also informative.
The FAQ area has an unusually well-organised feel, with, for example, semantically meaningful URLs, and an impressive overall "design tone", on which a great deal of care has been lavished. (In passing I also noticed that some though not all of the code for the site is valid, something which always makes me well-disposed towards a service.) From what I could make of it a user can take the code of an existing Ning social network site that they like, and use this as a starting point for their own network. This is explained technically in Ning's description of its underlying architecture. Shades of Tim O'Reilly's 1999 essay "Where the Web leads us", of which this is a short extract:
"Perhaps even more important, both the technology and the Internet ethic made it legitimate to copy features from other people's web sites. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages that were used to implement various features on a web site could be easily saved and imitated. Even the CGI scripts used to create dynamic content were available for copying. Although traditional computer languages like C run faster, Perl became the dominant language for CGI because it was more accessible. While Perl is powerful enough to write major applications, it is possible for amateurs to write small scripts to accomplish specialized tasks. Even more important, because Perl is not a compiled language, the scripts that are used on web pages can be viewed, copied, and modified by users. In addition, archives of useful Perl scripts were set up and freely shared among web developers. The easy cloning of web sites built with the combination of HTML+CGI+Perl meant that, for the first time, powerful applications could be created by non-programmers."
Of course judging a service by how it describes itself is unwise. You have to have used it. So if any readers of Fortnightly Mailing have experience of Ning it would be great if they would post a comment with their assessment of it, especially from the the point of view of its role or potential role in learning.
I've been using Ning for a couple of weeks now. Jay Cross created the Internet Time Community to which I belong. It's in the early days, but the signs are good for connecting with like minded people around the world.
Regarding Ning from a user perspective, well, Jay has done all the hard work with creating the environment the community resides in, and he appears to be pretty happy with the support he has been getting. See here.
From my perspective, Ning seems easy to use. It's easy to post to and all the normal functionality you would expect with a social network (forums, blogs, tags, walls, RSS support) is there.
But I think the tool isn't really too relevant, apart from making it usable. The question is whether social networks play a role in learning. And I believe they do. I've been exposed to many new ideas through credible sources that wouldn't have been possible without the connections I can make online.
As I say, early days, but positive about the Ning experience and excited about the potential of the Internet Time Community.
Posted by: Dominic Atkinson | 01/06/2007 at 14:53