Ning – Social media platform

I’ve picked up on a couple of blogs recently referring to Ning, a platform for creating individual social networks or communities of practice.
It allows you to have your own site to which people can sign up and
leave blog posts, have forum discussions, upload photos and videos and
publish RSS feeds. The most recent commentary was from Dave Briggs over at LGNewmedia.

I sometimes wonder whether it would be preferable to abandon the bespoke work we’re doing with the IDeA CoP paltform
and use an off the shelf development environment such as Ning. Not sure
yet what the right answer is, since I also have to ensure the IDeA CoP
solution is fully integrated with other (legacy) platforms, such as the
IDeA knowledge web site.  I can see that the technology trend – call it Web 2.0, mashups, Ajax or whatever – is bringing sophisticated content integration and publishing tools within the reach of anyone with a broadband connection. 

Scoble has a couple of videos up about Ning if you want to know more.