Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Social Networking platforms

I joined Ning and looked up Cooking networks. I found many networks but each network had only one or two members (not what I see as a network). In Ning each member can set up their own network so the result is many "networks" with a few members. Some "networks" were by invitation only (how do they expect to form a network if interested people cannot access the site).

This seems an inefficient method of trying to make contact with people who have similar interests to you. There should be only 1 or 2 networks with many members rather than 20 networks with 1 or 2 members.
These small networks could benefit by facilitation. An online Facilitator could explain the benefits of combining networks and offer to help set up one network which members of all these smaller networks could join & as a result communicate with people who have an interest in cooking.

2 comments:

Leigh Blackall said...

Perhaps compare and contrast your experience with Ning to the same test on Facebook? It could be that Ning is too small for what you are looking for... it could be that Ning attracts people who want to start groups, where in Facebook it might be more people who want to join groups...

The thing I wonder about is how much of these social networking sites generate "wall gardens"? Here we are, networking across Blogger, Wordpress, Google Groups and Wikieducator... do we even need things like Facebook? I guess we do if we feel the need to join things...

vida said...

Blogge, Google Groups & wikieducator are groups which have specific purposes for us. I don't feel the need to join groups such as Facebook etc as they seem like a waste of time to me. There is no reason for me to join so I won't.