They are more expensive, but they are older guys and have business experience that i don’t have. I looked at Kickapps and Community Server and although inexpensive, i didn’t want ads and i didn’t want to manage the site.

I am doing this project for a large corporation and when i looked at staffing the project development and then hiring moderators and people to manage the site, it looked like a nightmare. Not only that, but they can have it up in a short time.

At Small World (http://www.smallworldlabs.com) working with people like the American Cancer Society, Special Olympics, Hyperion/Oracle & The Dallas Morning News to build communities using our platform and making sure its inline with their goals for growing the community.

Starting with a strong platform is really just a first step.

Quick point in response to YouTubeSearcher’s post. Yes, DNS masking is important, but the key point is that our philosophy is to offer publishers and developers complete control over their communities at their own URL’s. Widget building and customizable video players are also ways we hope to empower developers. For us empowering developers it what it’s all about.

Also, our pricing is based on pay-for-performance. Simply put, you pay us based on how well you do. The more successful you are, the happier we all are.

Oh, BTW, check out how Vibe’s using KickApps. http://www.vibeverses.com.

Take care everyone,
Alex

We used it for SoCon07 (where Crowdvine debuted) and also FooCamp is using it for their social network.

While we certainly have lots of small, very-focused networks, size is absolutely not a constraint, and we offer cheap bandwidth/storage expansion options should your network take off. CW’s One Tree Hill network and Rawkus Records’ My Rawkus are two great examples of larger branded networks running on the Ning platform (but mapped with their own domains).

As for being “painted into a corner,” we offer any site owner the ability (for free) to take their network’s full source code and uploaded content anywhere they’d like at any time.

John

http://www.developmentnow.com/.....tware.aspx

Miles is right in that there is a balance of options for different needs.

You could start with an existing (free or commercial) app & customize it a little (or a lot); you could build your own using Drupal, Joomla, Rails, etc.; or you go with a turnkey provider like Ning, KickApps, Me, etc.

But there are a lot of customization options no matter which route you take. Only some of those options need a programmer.

I just finished up a SNS project using an open-source platform tied to a few other popular open-source products (a wiki & a blogging engine). For me, leveraging an existing platform was worth it, but certainly not the right approach for everyone.

I have other colleages who just use Ning & are happy with it, using it as almost the next community step beyond having official company forums.

People can contact me offline if they want further elaboration — this comment is already pretty big.

There are also companies (like us) that provide a solution that is between KickApps & Ning and a full-on custom built site where they customize their base platform for you - http://www.smallworldlabs.com.

1) We currently have over 67,000 social networks on Ning today (vs. the 30,000 in the story).

2) For our optional $4.95/month fee for anyone interested, we enable domain mapping for both networks and widgets (and have since December of 2005). Our full list of premium services is at: http://www.ning.com/about/businesses.html

Thanks!

This helps filter out the spam sites that may have 1000 spam sites on one server with 1 IP address but 1000 unique domain names.

- DNS masking - I believe hurts SEO ..

Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
… self-serve job security …