Based mainly on my accidental success in building such a lively, tight knit and fun little community here, I am now getting a few paying gigs from people who want to know how to build “social networks.” I’m not sure it is possible to duplicate the level of passion and involvement that we get here (because you’re all so damned weird) but I’m willing to giving it a shot for paying customers to cover my Starbucks nut.
As part of my research, I’ve been playing around with Ning, which is Marc Andreessen’s latest venture. Ning is basically WordPress for social networks–a brilliant, perfect and very simple online application that allows anyone to build a fully-functioning social network for free. (There are some advanced features–more bandwidth, more control–that cost a little extra but it has everything that businesses pay design firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. But, I digress.
For educational purposes (my own), I just built in about a half-hour a companion site to this one called Sequenza 21 at Ning, using RSS feeds to pull in some content to lure new people over here. You can all join if you like and put up your pictures and bios–maybe we’ll get some additional eyeballs. If anyone wants to blog over there, I’ll turn on the blogging feature.
And don’t miss Social Media Today, which is another of my endless stream of online ideas.
“I’m happy to be one of the guinea pigs, Jerry.
Oink-tweet-squeak.”
If you listen closely you’ll notice that the sound guinea pigs make is something like “wub wub”. This is a universal phenomenon. It is known as the World-Wide Wub.
I’m happy to be one of the guinea pigs, Jerry.
Oink-tweet-squeak.
xoxoxo
OK, I did it. Seems a little bit like ClassicalLounge.com. Curious to see how it all takes off.