Fraxi – a "Ning" For Digg Clones

Ning (and now flux) commoditized social networking and allow anyone who can click a mouse to have their own network. The same thing is now happening with social bookmarking sites that allow people to vote bookmarks up to a top list (better known as Digg).

There are scores of Digg clones already, of course. The most well known is Reddit, which was acquired by Condé Nast a little over a year ago. But there are also emerging platforms that allow anyone to create their own Digg-like site.

We’ve covered these as they launch. Our favorite is coRank, which recently relaunched and has a lot of loyal users.

Pligg is another – it’s a well known open source project that allows people to create Digg-like sites. Pligg was recently put up for sale, but as far as I can tell it was never sold.

Today Pligg announced (buried in a blog post) that the upcoming launch of Fraxi

Soon we will be launching a new service called “Fraxi” which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon.

Not much in the way of details, but the Fraxi site is up with a landing page. See this blog for more editorial.

Digg itself will likely enter this market in 2008, we hear. This could possibly be through an acquisition, although a source tells us this would be for customers, not technology.