Social Networks

While poking around on Dosh Dosh I found a website that's apparently getting pretty popular. It's called Mashable! and it seems to be trying to combine the blog news community with social networking. This is an interesting idea, as normally on the blog news community you don't spend much time with other users. Mashable! promotes that sort of user interaction in the social network format. Obviously it's good for other things too, and the site is taking off. Dosh Dosh cites a BusinessWeek article that reports 4 million pageviews per month for Mashable!

This whole social network business got me thinking about what it takes to set up your own social network. Blogs have Wordpress, which lets you download a template and run a blog on your own server. There doesn't seem to be that sort of free template for social networks. With the viral flood of web users joining online social networks, it seems like someone should have that capabilty.

Ning comes closest to what I'm thinking of. Ning allows you to join one site and become a member of hundreds of online social networks. The fewer forms I have to fill out to get into these things, the better. It seems to be adopting the Wordpress format, where you make a user with Wordpress and your account works with any Wordpress run blog, but it doesn't allow you to download and customize the code for your social network as Wordpress does. As far as I know. Ning still looks like it's worth checking up on.