Crowdvine is a hosted free white label social network application created by Tony Stubblebine.
Setting your own network is dead simple. You just need to pick a name, pick some profile questions, and then send out invites with a personalized message. You network is hosted at name.crowdvine.com Profiles consist of a photo, location, personal link, description, blog posts, and the questions the creator of the network chooses. Members can also incorporate RSS feeds from another blog, photo stream, or social bookmarking site. See the Foo Camp social network for an example.
The networks are either open to everyone, open but moderated, or private to the creator’s friends. The design of the site is customizable by main colors and adding code to the header.
Social interaction is basic right now. Members can invite friends, make friends, message each other, and comment on each others pages. By contrast, Ning is more mature, enabling plugins to the network and a more polished finish.
It will be interesting to see what other features are part of the service. I wonder if it will offer Linked-In type functionality eventually. It seems as though they don’t currently have much competition.
Care to compare to PeopleAggregator? If there aint OpenID support here, for one thing, then it sounds like a snoozer to me as social networking frameworks go.
whoops it stripped my comment for some reason
I was just saying that ning is a great app, i see it becoming the standard for this type of service.
I agree, snoozer . Ning is the choice right now.
I think the concept is a good idea. It makes sense that people would be interested in smaller, invitation only networks – that happened with first generation online communities all the time.
Is this only for consumers or for businesses too?
God the internet is boring these days. Is there any serious technology? All of this stuff is so basic… Ning is cooler but probably came at a much higher price.
Obviously all the Ning employees are still at work this late
@ Mark, I agree. I am sick of listening to it all. Vaporware.
I like the idea, and I’m just learning about ning which also seems nice.
Question to the group.
Does anybody offer white label off the shelf ning/crowdvine software you can buy to run on your own servers?
We really liked using CrowdVine during SoCon07 and PodCamp Atlanta 07. It added so much to our conferences; a great auto meeting facilitator. Thanks Tony!
http://socon.crowdvine.com/
Hey Wayne!
I think kickapps, crowd factory, and five across offer software you can download and run on your own servers. I’m not positive though.
Patricia, as a matter of fact, we are
Hee hee.
Thanks for the kind words about Ning. We appreciate it!
That being said, I also think one dude putting Crowdvine together solo is definitely a feat.
Congrats, Tony!
Thanks Nick for the kind review. It’s coming together, although it’s definitely been a feat. Here’s a summary of what I’m trying to achieve:
http://www.stub...dvine_open.html
Silicon Dalley: I’m not sure what LinkedIn functionality you want. Introductions? I set up a network for Graduates of O’Reilly, which happens to be a much more valuable professional network for me than what I have on LinkedIn.
Marshall: No OpenID yet, but coming. I’ve always liked the identity aggregation parts of People Aggregator. In a tech network my blog is a big part of my identity and I’d like to have it aggregated rather than just linked to. That’s already built into CV.
SpaceyG: Thanks. You and the Atlanta crowd have been unbelievably kind to me.
Gina: You are a star and you’ve built amazing software at Ning. Thanks for the kudos.
Who in the real world would actually use this? Or Ning for that matter. Not seeing anything ever coming of this or ning. Except in a few years some conversations that start with… “What the hell were you thinking…”
One other thing. Stubblebine, I see you are bending over backward to offer features that only a few nerds would ask for. Get your head on man. Get yourself some traffic and a userbase. Otherwise you are dead. 99.9% of people don’t give a flip about that.
i like it tony. guess you’re veteran enough to not give a f about what others think and just do your thing. congrats
I really enjoy how Ning works. I will give Crowdvine a test drive and see what I think.
Really would like my platform neutral manager for my user profile….would like to try a new network without setting up another profile.
Would also like to be able to replicate my business social network to other networks as well….
Well I will keep waiting.
I’ve tried Ning, but I found KickApps way better. If you know CSS, it is drop dead simply to have a completely customized social network with photo, video, audio, blogs, and forums. I liked Ning, but KickApps seemed much better as a “white label” solution.
Crowdvine looks great Tony. Very well done!
The issue with NING is that the users actually BELONG to NING. so for example there is no way to know the email addresses of the users who have registered to your network.
So, even if you manage to build up a large socaial network, its value is literally NONE, because even if you can move your application, you can not move your users.
This is a terrible drawback.
Well done, Tony. App looks great.
@ Wayne Lambright: kwiqq also offer a social networking solution which can be purchased and run on your own servers: http://www.kwiqq.com.
Good Work. I am also working solo on a social networking/online presence management platform. I am now running a private beta, http://CliqCafe.com, and hope to open up to the public soon. I am targeting small businesses and structured off-line organizations with features like turn-key virtual hosting and email forwarded, site traffic analytics/reports, and data exports.
As an aside, I would not be surprised to see some sort of software renaissance soon (if not already), where productivity and software innovation shifts permanently from small-large funded companies to independent developers and micro-businesses.
Good luck with your site.
re. Gina’s comment.
Gina is absolutely right. That’s why I didn’t like Onesite, too. If you want to have a truly white labeled social network that is self-contained, you don’t have as many options. As I mentioned, I found KickApps to be the best.
“The issue with NING is that the users actually BELONG to NING. so for example there is no way to know the email addresses of the users who have registered to your network.”
Tony – how much support do you provide moving people to a truly white label network? Can people pay a license for your software? Will you help set people up on another server?
Tony
Re: who would use this? A lot of people are using crowdvine as a pre-event networking tool for conferences. It’s like the Who’s Who directory, except social.
san: nice summary. That’s exactly right and the number one reason I’ve avoided investors. It gives me a lot more flexibility to do it according to my vision.
GinaF, Jake, Tony12: I don’t have those problems solved but I do have a pretty clear intention to not lock-in your data. The last company I worked for, Wesabe, put out a Data Bill of Rights. I think we need the same thing for people creating sites on hosted software. If you turn into the next MySpace I don’t want to stop you from breaking out into your own site. In that case, of course I’ll license the software to you. As for smaller licensing deals, it’s an option that I haven’t explored yet.
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