Ning

The idea of creating one’s own social network doesn’t have to reside within existing social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace. Ning offers the advantage of customization, allowing one to provide unique identifying characteristics—such as company logos, team mascots or other unique identifiers. Of course what you lose in this process is a built in audience. The immense popularity of FB or MS means users are already familiar with the interface and likely are already logging in to their profiles to update their status or respond to messages.

But would it be advantageous for a company to use Ning to coordinate employees or project teams? I believe it would, much the same way a wiki would. A specialized social network allows for instant udating of status of personnel or project goals. Speaking from personal experience I believe it would be helpful in time-critical situations and also helps build a rapport amongst people working in different departments on a particular project. In a digital library situation it might be helpful for catalogers to know when digital images have been uploaded to a server for cataloging and metadata creation. Programmers might then need to access the images to determine programming needs for dissemination. So the bottom line might be that creating custom social networks is best for small, personalized or goal oriented tasks but a personalized network for the sake of having a personalized network may be swimming upstream, especially with the popularity and ease of use of existing social software networks.