Awakened Voice

This post continues the practice of giving advice to those web services that aim to capitalize on the explosion in independent media publishing on the internet. These services are attempting to gain the favor of bloggers, podcasters, community builders and enterprise level producers who are looking to leverage Web 2.0 or social media technology.
Sadly, just [...]

I’ve said before that I believe there will be millions of social networks on the web in the future. These networks may consist of just a few people up to thousands of people. If you think about it every family could have a social network. Every sports team could sprout a social network. Fans of [...]

I was never a big fan of Facebook in the first place. I have an account there. I have a bunch of friends over there. I’ve used the thing occasionally over the last four months. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about the technology. You’re limited in a lot of ways, not the least of [...]

At first glance the OpenSocial initiative announced by Google last week seemed to be a huge victory for independent web developers like myself. The message was clear. Let’s find a way for developers to make it easy for users of web applications to port their data between websites. It sounds like a great answer to [...]

“Dead networks mean that it’s super easy to create your own social network for free on Ning and that people are dipping their toes to experiment in this particular pond.” Gina Bianchini, Ning
This may be taking the old adage to have respect for the dead a bit too far.
Ning, a service whose tools I admire [...]

I received a nice comment from one of Ning’s product managers after pointing out some issues with search and spam/seo activity on a post yesterday.
I also noticed that CEO Gina Bianchini has posted on the spam issue to the Ning blog.
Its heartening to know that they are willing to address these issues at a very [...]

I’m starting to get more inquiries from people who are looking to build or show off new social networks. These communications have got me to thinking about some important characteristics of social networks that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Functionality - The features that you provide on your social network amount to a web based service. Does the [...]