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PayPal & Facebook join OpenID

PayPal and Facebook have joined the OpenID Foundation, and will now work with the rest of the community. This is great news for new developers and social networking entrepreneurs, as Facebook brings their membership heft and User Interface chops, while PayPal brings their security experience and the potential of a payment platform tied into the OpenID.

If you haven’t brought OpenID into your application yet, there’s now no reason to wait. Your users will be able to log into your site with their OpenID account, and bring their identity and friends with them. This will increase new signups, improve the richness of your application, and reduce the friction of “network overload.”

No Comments Posted in Data Portability, Social Networking Industry, Social Networking Platforms

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

How to build a stong community…

Ben Huh from I Can Has Cheeseburger gives 15 tips on how to build a stong community…

My favourite:

5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market

People who work in the technology industry tend to over engineer things. Don’t complicate your problems, simplify them. If you need to add a commenting system to your site don’t build it from scratch, download one. Whatever you do, do it quickly.

I Can Haz Community? | Think Vitamin.

No Comments Posted in Encouraging Activity, Nurturing the Community, Social Networking Platforms

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

The Dangers of Ignoring Your Audience

Clive Thompson has a great piece on Wired called Social Networks and the Wrath of Moms, which outlines what happened when UrbanBaby.com, which was purchased by CNET in 2006, launched a redesign that didn’t take into account how their users actually used the site…

No Comments Posted in Encouraging Activity, Nurturing the Community, Uncategorized

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Huge Growth of Older Adults on Social Networks

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

Pew Internet: Adults and SNS.

No Comments Posted in Social Networking Industry

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Establishing a Community’s Culture – Online Community Report

The Online Community Research Network just released high-level results from its latest report: Key Factors Establishing an Online Community’s Culture

It reaffirms that features and tools aren’t as important as content, a clear value statement, and a well moderated community…

One key area we wanted to understand was the short list of factors that community managers thought were most important in establishing a communities culture. We asked: “What are the three most important factors in establishing and maintaining a community’s culture?”

The top three responses (in order) were:

* Quality, up-to-date content

* Have a clear objective / value statement 11% (12)

* strong moderation / facilitation 12% (13) of the community site was a critical factor.


No Comments Posted in Encouraging Activity, Nurturing the Community, Social Networking Industry

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Yahoo! Mail Gets Social

Yahoo! is finally unveiling another page in its Social Networking book, adding social networking features to Yahoo! Mail.

Along with a universla profiles, Yahoo! has also opened up Mail to outside developers who want to build applications that will run in step with Mail.

No Comments Posted in Social Networking Industry

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Social Networking for Patients

If  you’re looking for a focus for a social network, think beyond the good things in your life, and consider some of the challenges you’ve faced over the years. Common interests can bring people together, but not nearly as well as common foes, and the NY Times recently noted.

No Comments Posted in Business Models

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

New data reveals rapid growth in adoption of social media

Forrester has released updated numbers –what they call Social Technographics — tracking the adoption of social media.

The good news is that social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.
So if you are drawing your member from this group, your job just got a lot easier.

No Comments Posted in Social Networking Industry, Uncategorized

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Open Source Social Networking Platforms Based on Ruby on Rails

At least two open source social networking platforms based on Ruby on Rails are out there (if you know of others, please post a comment).

Insoshi is by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails. LovdbyLess is by less everything, and has a great story behind it:

Along with having our own products, we also develop websites for other companies. Last year we had more requests for a “social network that also does _________” than for anything else. Most of these projects were crippled with a budget so small that they would never be able to afford a well programmed site that meets their goals. So we said we should just build an open source social network platform and give it away.

Insoshi Features

  • Activity feeds
  • Profiles with photos and comment walls
  • Connections/friending
  • Discussion forums
  • Blogs with comments
  • Messaging, including read/replied/trashed
  • Search for profiles, forums, and messages
  • Admin panel with site preferences

LovdbyLess Features

  • Follow a user, mutual following is friending.
  • User-to-User Messaging
  • Profile Comments
  • User Blogs with Comments
  • Photo Gallery with Captions
  • Site Search for Friends
  • Profile Bio and Information
  • User Dashboard (Recent Activity of Friends)
  • Emailed Activity
  • Flickr Integration
  • YouTube Integration
No Comments Posted in Social Networking Platforms, Social Networking Software

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

Boomers Hitting Social Networks, Too

Social networking isn’t just for the college-aged kids.

41% of Baby Boomer internet users in the US have visited online social networks, according to a report from The NPD Group.

Although young web users (age 13-34) are significantly more likely to visit social-networking sites – and to visit them more often – more than half of Baby Boomers (age 44-61) visited a social-networking site in the past three months, with users averaging 15 days in one-month period.

Boomer who network are also more likely to pull out their wallets, the report found.

So, who are you targetting?

No Comments Posted in Business Models

If you found this blog post helpful, then you'll love the hundreds of tips, real-life examples, and proven strategies that you'll find in my Hands-on Guide to Starting a Niche Social Network!

Click here to learn more!

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