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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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!
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