If you want to have a Social Network, NING is a perfect platform for it, a service for creating your own social network for any niche with your choice of features, your design, your customization, and your members.

What is a Platform – it is  just a software program that is able to make some services available to other programs via API (Application Programming Interface).

Why we need a Platform - we do as a platform empower us to create, customize and maintain our applications to meet our specific needs. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time, a platform has the power to make us bypass the redesign of some services and make us users of the platform imbedded functionality.

Of course there are poor and powerful (rich in functionality) platforms. Ning is a powerfull one as we can build almost anything you want on it. 

When you creat your own network on Ning you have access to a lot of features to chose from, moderation and management tools which are priceless. More, you are in the driver sit, you will decide which features are appropriate for your purpose and how they will appear on your main page.

Example of features:

• Activities stream on real-time – they are latest activities across your network
• Applications – they allow members to communicate and interact with you
• Badges and widgets – to promote your network, blogs, websites, lenses, hubs
• Chat – priceless – you can participate to a live chatroom: network wide or one-to-one with a member (private)
• Events - you can organize events related with your activity
• Express yourself loading music, photos, videos
• Forum - your network can have a forum to discuses your niche, I’ll say, this is a must 
• Groups – if your topic is larger in scope, members can organize themselves into groups
• Integrate your blog or Website with your network, make your members participate…
• RSS – add external RSS feeds to your network’s main page
• Text Boxes – in your network’s main page you can use text boxes to add relevant text, photo, video
• Wiki-like Notes 

After you choose your features, you can came back and do maintenance.

I suggest to read and respond on forum, the discussion will tell you how are you doing, what topics your member want to talk, what needs they have. When you run out of ideas for a Digital Product, you can put a question on your forum, you will be surprised how many ideas you can pick up, or if you don’t have comments your topic is dead – no interest what so ever.

The old method of creation was to sit down with a white piece of paper in front of you and brain storm you own head.

The new Method, Social Networking Method will give you the unique chance to interact with a large community, pick up a lot of ideas, needs, controversy, and working around them you will create a product that is needed and you already have a pool of targeted prospects among your members.

Craft with care your bio, and network’s appearance. On Ning platform you have a lot of tools to change a theme, add your own graphics, add your own CSS, customize widgets, add photos, and customize your tabs.

Layout wise Ning is the most flexible platform I know.

Ning platform is FREE, by default you have a quota of 10GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth, this is a lot of space, you can fit 5,000 photos or 500 videos.  

If you want to have more then just default or other fancy features Ning has Premium Services for a decent amount per month.

This is one of my social network on Ning:

http://michaelaebay.ning.com

and I am working on other one which will be restricted to my new challenge on Squidoo:

http://www.squidoo.com/SquidIncomeGoal

Until next time Happy New Year

Michaela

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