While other social networks have obviously provided their users with access to these kinds of apps and widgets for a long time already, this is a major step forward for Ning. Ning, according to its own stats, currently hosts over 1.5 million different social networks (how many of these are active is a different question, however) and has about 33 million registered users. If Ning wants to continue to compete with Facebook and other social networks, it simply needs this kind of open development environment to provide its users with the right set of features, though it also looks like Ning actually has an Apple-like approval process for new apps in place.

Best known for its "enthusiast" wikis, Wikia hosts more than 50,000 fan sites including the Star Wars Wookieepedia, Harry Potter Wiki, Twilight Saga Wiki and World of Warcraft WoWWiki. In addition to some of the larger fan sites, Penchina also points to the Cannon Hacker Development Wiki, Recipes Wiki and Pet Diabetes Wiki as great examples of Wikia contributors.

While Wikia hosts nearly 3 million pages of content with a number of niche community sites, it's the fan pages that drive the majority of advertising and marketing revenue. Wikia's small team of less than 10 sales staff create packages that consist of everything from branded banner ads to embedded shows and contests. In addition to sponsors like World of Warcraft, a number of television studios are also in partnership talks.

Says Penchina, "In many cases, these sites are like small franchises and the editors are really dedicated. The input we've had from editors regarding advertising are suggestions I generally agree with." In the World of Warcraft Wiki the community has asked that no advertisements be permitted that might negatively affect game play. For this reason, Penchina's team does not allow advertisements for WoW gold.

By providing an environment where die hard fans and premium brands can coexist, Wikia is doing a great job maintaining its authenticity while also turning a profit. While the service has struggled to establish itself as a separate brand from its Wikipedia origins, it appears that the fan communities have done everything they can to make it a success from the ground up.

Ning is also an active proponent of OpenSocial and hosts a vast directory of OpenSocial apps that its users can use on their profile pages and networks.

Ning raised $60 million last April, and if Dan Frommer's calculations are right, it currently has an annual revenue of about $10 million from paid accounts, premium features, and advertising.

Compared to Facebook and MySpace, Ning, of course, is only a niche product, but it has clearly found its place in the social networking space.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network's own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

Some of Ning's most popular networks include Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Network, a network for the Ellen DeGeneres show, and rapper 50 Cent's social network. While Ning has a number of competitors, including KickApps and Crowdvine, Ning clearly leads the pack in terms of its user-base.

Ning is also very popular among academics and teachers, who often use it to set up networks and blogs for their classes instead of relying on more commercial platforms like Facebook or MySpace or having to use cumbersome class management software.

The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.

Grou.ps aims to provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to collaborate online and currently has about 200,000 active users worldwide.

Going Open Source

In open-sourcing its application, Grou.ps is following in the steps of a growing number of formerly closed source online services that have decided to go this route lately, with Reddit probably being the most prominent one. Grou.ps argues that this move will allow them to commoditize the Grou.ps platform and give them a competitive advantage to hire the most talented programmers from the pool of open source contributors.

However, opening up the code is not a panacea for developers by any means - while some programs flourish once a lot of developers get their hands on the code, others have a hard time developing an active developer community around their open source offerings.

Grou.ps' closest competitor, Ning, has a considerably larger user base and offers a very similar service. However, while Ning has advertising on its pages, grou.ps does not - though you can add your own AdSense code to the site. Ning, so far, has raised about $104 Million in four funding rounds.

Disclosure: Grou.ps founder Emre Sokullu has been a contributor to ReadWriteWeb in the past.

Right now, Facebook Pages can't be considered a complete social networking solution like Ning -- the feature set is just too limited and constricting, plus only businesses, brands/products, and artists can have them. But it is easy to see why Facebook Pages could be attractive to social media marketers. They're easy to set up and manage, and they come with access to a built in audience.

However, even if the coming changes noted by Smith add features to make Pages more complete mini-social networks, there are a lot of reasons why Facebook should not be looked at by companies as a Ning-alternative (or an alternative to any full branded social network provider). First and foremost, even though Facebook has shown some indications recently of being more open, they're still a very closed platform. Verizon may be making a mistake by putting all its eggs in one basket.

Facebook Pages should certainly be part of a social media strategy for businesses, brands, and artists, but it certainly shouldn't be the only part. Facebook's most popular Page, that of US presidential candidate Barack Obama, provides a good example of a complete social media strategy done right. In addition to his 900,000 strong Facebook Page, Obama has a presence on more than 10 other top social media sites including MySpace, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He also runs his own branded social network My.BarackObama.com. Obama's complete strategy has helped him to raise record amounts of money online during this campaign cycle and build awareness among the younger, Internet-centric demographic.

Unless Facebook transforms Pages into a Ning-like platform for hosting external branded social networks that hook into the Facebook social graph (which seems unlikely given Facebook's clear reluctance to open its walled garden, though it would be a very interesting twist -- and might actually be a Ning-killer), there's really no reason to follow Verizon's lead and use the site in place of a branded social network.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

You can't talk about interesting company blogs without mentioning Signal vs. Noise, the wildly successful blog about design, usability and small business from the makers of project management service Basecamp. This blog could easily stand on its own as compelling reading even if there wasn't a company behind it selling services. Sure enough, it's even got an ad on it from the elite boutique ad network The Deck. Signal vs. Noise has 88k subscribers - making it fun and educational for those subscribers is great for the business of 37signals.

Ning

Ning powers niche social networks and the company's blog is a great place to find out about all kinds of groups that are actively using this technology. Some of them a real surprise. The International Society of Space Entreprenuers, the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine and the ASPCA Book Club all have social networks! Who knew? Now how about some data portability, Ning? If you want to read about the theoretical side of niche social networks, check out data portability lovin' competitor PeopleAggregator's blog, written by the company's prolific CEO Marc Canter.

Viddler

Viddler is a crazy feature rich video hosting service with a very good blog. In addition to feature announcements, the company posts a wide variety of videos that are interesting to watch. That's where I discovered this one below, for example.

Newsgator

RSS company Newsgator has a great blog about RSS use cases, data portability debates and other industry topics. Maybe I'm just an RSS head - but I really enjoy their blogging. Newsgator competitor Attensa also has a very good blog about all things RSS - but it sure could use some more updates!

A.viary

Collaborative design tool A.viary has a couple of very good blogs. Their idea blog is full of interesting content that regularly hits the front page of digg. These folks have some seriously juvenile gender issues going on, which I have given them a hard time about before, but their blog is still fun to read otherwise. Every post they put up is worth a look.

Adaptive Path

User experience and design firm Adaptive Path publishes a very thought provoking blog. I usually scan company blogs for announcements and videos - but their longer posts often convince me to stop and read. OLPC: The Beauty of Failure and Greedy Mobile Interfaces? I'll stop and read posts with titles like that.

Amazon Web Services

What could be more dreary than commoditized data processing and storage services? While that might sound boring, the AWS Blog does a great job of highlighting cool things that are done on top of Amazon Web Services. Lately they've put up posts about how AWS are being used by the New York Times to provide online access to 150 years of archives and by the little ShareThis widget that you've probably seen on hundreds of thousands of blogs around the web. Lots of charts, graphs and other fun stuff for nerds on this blog.

Strands

Here at RWW we've been following the mega-funded recommendation service Strands for several years. We find what they do fascinating. Their company blog is mostly about company announcements, but they have really interesting announcements. Last.fm on Nokia phones? Cool! The most interesting section of their blog though is the data portability category and throughout the blog you'll find some really deep thoughts on cutting edge innovation.

Articulate

Articulate is a an e-learning tools company with a very popular blog. More than 20,000 subscribers actively discuss topics like how to make a good screencast and how best to work with clip art. This was a new one to me but I've already enjoyed spending some time on this company's blog. What more could you ask from a company blog? Good content creates a community of advocates that share the blog with friends, some of whom undoubtedly will purchase the company's products.

These Are But a Few

There really are a fair number of interesting company blogs around the web. We'd love to hear about some of your favorites. Others that are worth checking out include Oracle Apps Lab for a fun discussion of web 2.0 in the enterprise, the Lijit blog on "searching the social graph" and the many fun blogs published by Adobe.

If you found this post of interest, you might enjoy reading our coverage of some of the top new social media company evangelists as well.

We hope you find some of these blogs worth subscribing to and we'd love to learn about other blogs that cover topics of general interest that even non-customers would enjoy reading.

PatientsLikeMe is a social network for people to share experiences based around mental and physical illness. People can use the site to connect with others experiencing the same issues, discuss treatments, and track progress. The site is relatively new and so far has communities for ALS/Motor Neuron Disease, Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, HIV/AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), Parkinson's Disease, and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). People can connect with other patients based around specific symptoms they are experiencing or treatments they are trying, and they can read the latest research on the site. PatientsLikeMe plans to expand its communities into other health areas in the future.

Trusera feels a little like MySpace centered around health issues. People who join Trusera are given a profile on which they can share stories, keep a journal, and create discussions about the things they are dealing with. The site aims to connect people with similar medical backgrounds so they can discuss and share common experiences.

DailyStrength is a huge network of online support groups. The site lets users discuss medical conditions with people experiencing the same thing but with the anonymity of the Internet if they desire to stay hidden. Users also get MySpace-like social networking profiles where they can keep a journal, make connections, upload photos or videos and give out "hugs" to anyone who looks like they could use one. One of the most compelling features of Daily Strength is the treatment directory, where members can review treatments and let others know if and how well a treatment worked for them.

Hope Cube is another fairly new social network based around the idea of people providing support for others going through the same things they're dealing with. In addition to basic social networking features, the site has a Yahoo! Answers-like health discussion community, and uniquely has a list of trained professionals available as friends on the site. There are huge potential liability risks for doctors giving out advice over the Internet, so it is unclear just how much advice the Hope Cube doctors would be willing or able to give (right now it doesn't look like many of them have participated much on the site). According to the site, Hope Cube has plans to move into ZocDoc territory as well and do online appointment scheduling.

iMedix is a MySpace-style social networking site that links people based on common medical conditions. Users enter conditions they are interested in and the site uses tags to link them together. Beyond social networking, iMedix also adds a health information search engine to the mix. ReadWriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines had a full review when the site launched last December.

Healia is a slickly designed health community site based around questions and answers. Users form groups around specific health issues and ask and answer questions in a Yahoo! Answers-style environment and the site has a list of trained medical professionals who participate as well. Healia tracks its top contributors using "Healia Points." Right now the points just get you on a list of the week's most helpful members, but in the future, says Healia, they may be redeemable for something more.

ICYou (a clever play on words where the IC, in this case, stands for "Intensive Content") is a health video sharing site. Patients and doctors upload videos sharing the latest health information, their own personal experiences, or advice for others. ICYou also creates some of its own content on the site, mainly consisting of interviews with patients and doctors.

Take the features of every site we've mentioned in this roundup so far, and you have TauMed. Along with social networking, TauMed has a question and answer site, topical health guides, communities based around specific ailments, health news, health information search, video sharing, patient stories, a drug database, and even a directory of doctors. Phew! With all that, the site is still pretty easy to get around and certainly has some helpful information to be found.

MDJunction is a network of online support groups and discussion boards that feels a lot like DailyStrength -- right down to the concept of "hugs." In addition to the discussion board based support groups, MDJunction has a MySpace-style social network with all the usual trimmings.

While Ning isn't specifically a health related support site, it is one of the best places to find social networks devoted to specific physical or mental health issues. Ning has over 220,000 social networks and is growing at a rate of 1,000 per day. Search the site for whatever type of support group you're looking for and you're likely to find a niche network dedicated to just that. For example, here's a search for "diabetes."

Bonus site: If you're craving a more face-to-face support setting, try Meetup to find a real world support group in your town.

Are there any general support group 2.0 sites we've missed? Let us know in the comments below.

As other social networks came onto the scene, some artists ventured out, creating profiles on sites like Facebook, Bebo, and the like. But MySpace remained the number one spot for music, musicians, and music fandom when it came to social networking.

Now, MySpace's function as the central place for fans to gather is starting to change.

Today, a growing number of artists are using their social networking profiles to funnel their fans out of those large, public networks and into their own private social networks.

Take for example, social network Thisis50.com, a fan site for rapper 50 Cent. The network is less of a traditional online fan club and more of a place for 50 Cent to showcase new tunes as well as interact with his fans by releasing news and commenting on fans' profile pages.

Thisis50.com

Why Artists Want Their Own Networks

On the surface, it may not seem like there's anything too different about this private social network and a typical MySpace profile page, but behind the scenes, it's a whole new ball game: the difference is the control.

Says Chris "Broadway" Romero, director for new media at G-Unit Records, which handles Thisis50, "The thing that separates Thisis50 from MySpace is we control the e-mail database. We can email members if we want to."

Not only that, but artists can also sell ads on the site, offer downloads, and sell merchandise. But most importantly, they own the content and data, something MySpace can't offer.

These artists aren't worried about data portability and how to make it easy for fans to jump from a main social network like MySpace to their private network. They know their fans will just follow them there.

So, now, the big social networks are just becoming a means to advertise to fans about the "real" social network - the one the artists control. These private social network's do double-duty, functioning as the artists' main homepage as well. No longer boring, label-produced marketing tools, these private social networks are a personalized way for artists to reach their community while also promoting their products - music and merchandise.

Building Private Social Networks

To build these private social networks, services like Ning and Social Project's Flux are providing the tools.

Flux's fShare product, for example, provides a way for anyone to share content like videos, blogs, or photos across the social web, be it on MySpace, Facebook, LJ, or Blogger, as well as one any Flux-powered community. An artist who puts the fShare widget code on their site provides their fans an easy send that content across the web: by email, embedded code, or directly to social networking sites.

When an artist upgrades to Flux's largest package, Flux Custom, the possibilities are even greater: member profile, community pages, easy integration of photos and videos, discussion boards, pre-built templates and customizable layouts, content moderation and flagging tools, and more.

Fans benefit, too, from using a centralized service like Flux. They can create one Flux profile and then join the networks of any artist using the platform without having to re-register on each site.

Meanwhile, as the fans participate on these networks, the artists get detailed information about their users - what the watched, what the clicked on, and what they shared - analytics MySpace couldn't provide.

The cost for artists to get started is relatively low, too - only $34 per month at Ning and at Flux, it's a percentage of the revenue earned. The artists might hire someone to run the site, but once fans get involved, they're often the ones posting content, so the staff doesn't have to work nearly as hard to keep the site fresh.

So far, the model is working. Fans are not only participating, but are also happy to buy directly from the site, be it music, ringtones, or merchandise, again making artists question their supposed need for a label.

Today, several well-known artists have launched their own networks built on the Flux platform, including The Cure, Sheryl Crow, Ashlee Simpson, Pussycat Dolls, Nicole Scherzinger, Esmee Denters, Halfway to Hazard, Souljaboy, Lil John, Mims, Pitbull, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Michael, J Holiday, and, of course, 50 cent.

Concerns

However, some questions comes to mind: for one, if the real musician-to-fan interaction is moving off of MySpace and similar networks, will this hurt them? MySpace especially draws strength from its music offerings and has plans to launch a music service in the future.

While well-known artists might be relocating their biggest fans to interact with them on their own private networks, MySpace shouldn't be too impacted by the loss just yet, although they may miss out on some potential revenue streams once their music store goes live.

However, MySpace will still remain a launchpad for new artists for some time. Once these artists make it big, they may launch their own site. But behind them, plenty of upcoming artists will be available to fill the void.

Another concern some have voiced is that these disparate offerings will lead to "a vast disarray of networks in our midst," which isn't "good news for the social web in general."

Maybe, but maybe not.

As some have guessed, social networking is becoming "a feature, not a destination," so we're only going to see more social networks in the future...but this doesn't have to be a bad thing.

If Flux and Ning joined up with the Data Portability movement, for example, moving in and out of these various networks wouldn't be a big deal.

And then we could enjoy social web, the music, the fandom, and whatever else comes along next, the way that it is meant to be.

The ability to set up an Open Source social network is now available to anyone who can put a Mediawiki install on their servers. Look out Ning and other proprietary social networking platforms!

ArmchairGM in particular has been a big social networking innovator in the Wiki market and was acquired to help drive the design of the whole Wikia ecosystem. That site is made up of news driven editorial and has a remarkably active community of participants.

Why do social networking on a wiki? On one hand, a wiki is just a web site that's easy for anyone to edit - see Mahalo for example, another Mediawiki-based community. Beyond that though, social networking features create more points of contact for users with a website and help populate the site with content far beyond what the site's owners or solitary users editing alone could put in.

What's Included

The source code released offers Wikia's features for profile creation, avatar upload, friending (and "foeing" - the making of enemies in a network!), and a Facebook-"Wall" style messaging system for individual and group friend messaging called the Board. These features are now available for Mediawiki-based sites anywhere on the web, including for commercial use.

[Story continued below screenshot of profile page]

There are quite a few other features on ArmchairGM that I wish were being released but aren't. See the Digg-spy style Site Scout, for example. The Recent Changes display on GM is also quite nice but not being open sourced.

Why This Matters

This release is sure to be of interest to the owners of and participants in thousands of Mediawiki-based communities focused on a wide range of topics.

More generally, though, it could impact the social news and networking economy overall. We wrote earlier this week that the big social news aggregator model (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz) is vulnerable to market share erosion at the hands of niche social news sites. The same can be said for the big, general interest social networking sites. While most users will probably always want some presence on big sites, the potential is there to have the majority of communication online occur in a targeted niche community of people interested in and informed about the specific topics that an individual is interested in.

Related Resources

If you're interested in the wacky world of wikis, here's an RSS feed of blog posts about wikis (filtered with FeedRinse to remove mentions of Jotspot just because that's going to clog the airwaves for the next 48 hours), here's a wonderful video explaining wikis in plain english from CommonCraft, and here is wiki consultant Stewart Mader's great short video series 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

It probably seems like a thin difference, but within the social content platform lies an elegant concept. The site delivers a platform upon which any sort of content vehicle can be built.

Using the homebrew option, users can utilize BricaBox components called "blocks" to build entirely new sites with completely diverse functions all inside the site's framework. One prominent example was the Silicon Alley 100: Peoples' Choice awards of the area's most influential figures. As this video illustrates (literally), the scope of content possibilities is wide:

The beauty of the project revolves around its outward simplicity. Creating a framework that supports so many variables took some failed experiments in other Web languages, before being rewritten in PHP. According to co-founder and CTO Kyle Bragger, BricaBox was initially built with Ruby on Rails, but scalability proved impossible due to the technical complexity of the service. But therein lies the elegance.

Despite the complex actions happening under the hood, users need not know anything about Ruby or PHP or anything difficult for that matter, they need simply to have an idea and initiative. Co-founder and CEO Nate Westheimer sees the the service as a fundamental evolution in Web publishing. "Think about what Blogger was before people knew about blogs," says Westheimer. "The Web has progressed since then. Now we have a more connected Internet -- both in terms of data and socializing. The time has come for a publishing platform with both elements. BricaBox is a simple way to mix and mash the tools needed to create unique, social content websites." Westheimer claims that "no one else does that."

Whether or not the Web will embrace his concept remains to be seen, but BricaBox appears to have created something unique. As the above image shows, it's not Ning and it's not Wordpress. Tell us in the comments if you know of a similar service.

• The Turkish population on Facebook is estimated to exceed 2.1 million, which places Turkey just behind the USA, UK, and Canada, and ahead of English-speaking Australia.
• 10 out of the 150 most active applications on Facebook are in non-English languages. 1 is in Spanish, the other 9 are in Turkish.
• There are 6 non-English apps in the first 10 pages of the Recently Popular list - they are all in Turkish.

Further, some of Facebook's fascinating visitor numbers coming out of ComScore and other web metric firms come from the Turkish effect. I had the chance to ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about it at the Crunchies event, and he agreed that Turkey was having an effect on Facebook's traffic. This is actually a threat for Facebook. Because if non-English speakers dominate an entire network, it could lead to the alienation of the existing user base, similar to what happened with Orkut in its early days. Honor Gunday, the founder of one the largest social networks in Turkey, Zurna, enviously calls this "Orkutization."

Secondly, this investment in Yonja is not the only success we've heard about lately out of Turkey. As Mike Butcher recalls, cember.net was recently acquired by the European business networking leader Xing. This is actually a rather big move, because while LinkedIn has a very strong position in America, they have zero presence in other locations. LinkedIn might be fast being erased by Xing's global expansion. In a global, connected world, that's not a good sign for LinkedIn. And note that Xing is already a public company. So if LinkedIn delays an exit a little more, it may lose its advantageous position, even in the US. In other words, I'm not as optimistic about LinkedIn as our own Bernard Lunn. A small delay may make us call LinkedIn, LinkedInDust.

Similarly when you take a look at Alexa's ranking of Ning's biggest networks, you see that they are either adult-oriented or Turkish. So Ning is being nourished by Turkish traffic as well.

Last but not least, Turkey's high potential in social networking comes from its very young demographics. The number of young people in Turkey exceeds even the most populated countries in Europe. Moreover, the Internet penetration is quite high, and similar to Brazilians, Turkish people have very social characteristics; Turkey was the 2nd biggest market for Live Messenger, after all.

As for Mike's question, some influential people behind the world's most popular social networks come from Turkey. To name a couple, the founder of Orkut and the project manager of Windows Live are Turkish. So, "what is it about Turkey," is not actually the right type of question, although I can understand Mike, because Turkey is generally still a market in the dark, awaiting more exploration.