Social networks dedicated to niche groups focused around a common industry, interest or cause have been spreading like wildfire. Creating your own social network is now extremely easy using freely available tools such as Ning.  

1. Pick Your Purpose & Sign-up

Decide what your social network’s focus is going to be.  Is this a community for your customers to interact with you and each other or possibly an industry related group to bring together new ideas.

Now it’s time to sign-up on the ning.com site.  You’ll need your community name, tagline and description and you’re good to go.

2. Pick Your Style

Ning has a number of built in style choices that include background graphics (some definitely more MySpace crowd focused that others). You have full control over the colors for all text in the site which makes it very easy to get started.  For the more adventurous you can do lots of raw html customization which probably isn’t needed in most cases.

3. Load Up the Features

Ning has most of the typical social network features such as friend lists, member management and blogs. It also includes media capabilities for music, video and pictures — allowing members to rate these items as well.

4. Pay for Upgrades?

Ning communities include advertising space (they need to make their money somehow) by default.  You can pay a bit extra to kill the ads, use your own domain name (so instead of mynewgroup.ning.com you could set up mynewgroup.com) or even remove all references to Ning itself so your users don’t know that’s the platform you’re using.

5. Invite the Crew

Finally, you can either keep the community open to the public for member sign-ups or more likely if you’re creating something more targeted, send out the invitations to your email list.  You can also send out an invite link by copying it and putting it elsewhere — such as sending it to your LinkedIn connections or through an existing email newsletter or targeted publication.

6. And You’re Live

While it may not have the complete customization capabilities of rolling your own using open source or off-the-shelf packages, using Ning also gets rid of 99% of the start-up headaches so you can get rolling in minutes. Now you can focus on interacting with that community instead of wrestling with tech issues.

Apple’s iPhone has radically changed the mobile applications landscape by opening up mobile application development to any web development firm using Web 2.0 standard technology.  No longer is a specialized team who know the intricacies of proprietary cell phone software development necessary.  This allows much faster development of mobile apps and also removes the dependency on a mobile carrier to approve software on their wireless network. And with the 3G iPhone coming soon, web apps will be even faster than the current versions.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is the term commonly used to describe a new generation of web technologies and their focus on interactivity and data collaboration.  The core technology is typically AJAX (javascript in a web browser which talks back to the web server), which provides the snazzy functionality in sites like Google maps.  This new level of interactivity in a web page also usually includes providing the user access to different types of data at the same time (merging functionality from different web sites together in a single place).

Any Web Developer Can Do It…

Using web technologies to build connected apps has proven to be more efficient than using traditional mobile technologies. Mobile applications today are typically developed in J2ME (Java for phones), Brew or .Net, depending on what the target phone(s) support.  These technologies provide a standard but often require phone specific tweaks as not all phones behave the same way.  Usually this meant that a development team built up a special library over time that handled the quirks and work arounds for various phones.

Using Web 2.0 technologies means that nearly any capable web developer with any technology skill set (Java, Open Source, Microsoft, etc.) can now create mobile applications. It also means that existing applications can have new ‘skins’ applied to them to allow already developed functionality to be rolled out in a mobile environment.

All this boils down to it being much faster to build a connected app using web technologies than with traditional mobile technologies.

For example, during a recent Lextech training session, a small team developed a web app that pulled news headlines from the Tribune, created an audio file with the converted text to speech and sent it to the iPhone. With only about 4 hours of development work, the iPhone read news headlines aloud to the user.

Power to the People

With the mobile Web 2.0 revolution, wireless carriers are no longer the gate keepers controlling what applications users can access.  The mobile user merely points their web browser to the correct place and away they go.  This also simplifies the often nightmarish aspects of rolling out and updating applications that live inside of cell phones.  Now an update to the main server updates the mobile application for everyone.

Companies Already on Board

Many leading online firms are already creating iPhone specific versions of their applications to better serve existing customers and tap into the growing market of mobile app demanding consumers. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn have already rolled out versions of their applications dedicated to iPhone users. 

The Future…

The iPhone is merely the first in what will be a wave of Web 2.0 standards capable mobile devices in the market.  This mobile revolution will rapidly accelerate new kinds of applications we’ve never seen before and allow deeper interactivity while we’re physically anywhere.

Most systems (especially web applications) are built with very little thought about the post implementation life cycle of the system. One of the key components to staying ahead of the growth curve of a system (and quickly diagnosing problems) is a monitoring system that includes key system metrics.

Ping monitoring a server to determine if it’s alive is helpful to identify critical failures but does very little to tell you in advance when you’re going to run out of disk space or need to upgrade the server. The monitoring system should include key server level parameters (hard drive free space, memory used, CPU usage, network interface bandwidth, disk activity) as well as application specific items (numbers of users, page views, transaction counts, queue lengths, etc.) Having this information available for trending analysis makes it very managable to plan for system upgrades well in advance of the system going BOOM.

Identifying those key system metrics up front and building them into the application initially will be much more cost effective than try to retrofit them into an existing infrastructure. Putting in place a simple web based dashboard that includes graphs over time of those metrics allows any member of the technical or operational team to identify potential pitfalls.