Create your own social network sites

Ning (http://www.ning.com/)

Ning is great for those without alot of technical knowledge and who don’t want to host anything on their own hardware. It takes seconds to set up a site (I made one here for fun http://mitwebpub.ning.com/) and you can choose from a number of design templates available.

What makes your own social network on Ning special? It’s yours. Your brand and visual design. Your choice of public or private. Your very own members.

Free features include inserting your own brand, member management, your choice of custom text and widgets, rss feeds in and out, discussion forum, video feature and branded video players, chat room, facebook integration, groups, member blogs, and an events calendar.

Premium services are for fee, and include things like controlling ads, removing the Ning promotion, transferring your own domain name, more storage and more bandwidth.

Elgg (http://www.elgg.org/)

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.

Elgg is open source. That means, when you use Elgg, you have the benefit of being part of a large developer community, with the security and stability that hundreds of eyes can provide. It’s also headed and used by Curverider and its partners, so you can be assured that it’s in commercial use and will cope with the demands of a popular application. 

It runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL – the same open source platform that the majority of web applications are written in. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache web server.

We believe in an open, distributed, social web. As a result, Elgg supports technologies like OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial, and we are directly involved in community efforts to push the envelope when it comes to data portability, federation and the user experience. Elgg is a great way to future-proof your social applications.

Elgg was founded by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, and has been powering networks since 2004.

Scrapbooking Online

Now this is a kind of scrapbook I could get into. Check out Scrapblog.com.

No paper cuts, plenty of stickers and templates to choose from. You can add audio and video too, how’s that for bringing scrapbooking (yes, its a verb) into the new millenium?

Only one downer – they haven’t set it up so that you can get a print version when you are done. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got plenty of analogue-only family members who prefer tree products over 0’s and 1’s…

Yahoo! Pipes….

Yahoo! Pipes is a service that lets you combine different web feeds to create your own personal aggregate. You pipe data in, then mash it up…the result is a single rss feed that you created with a few clicks – no programming knowledge required.

From their overview page:

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

For example, YouTunes is a pipe which links the top 10 songs from iTunes with videos from YouTube. Created by Nick Bradbury, check out his site for a step by step breakdown on how he did it.