Ning.com

Building a social network in less than 30 seconds. Needless to say, it took me about 15 minutes, but after trying Ning I was shocked to see how easy was to build my own community. I decided to build one for me and a few guys from work who get together every Saturday (rain or snow!) to go play soccer in the morning. Once you register with an e-mail address, there are about 20 templates to choose from to start your page, so there is a lot of ways to make it look like if it were original content. Then, there many ways to customize it by importing your background or a logo for a header (these are the things that I tried, but I'm sure there are many other functions that you can do to build it). A really cool feature is that you can import (I don't know if I'm using the right word here) applications. For instance, I picked HULU to be part of the main menu. So, whenever I get a new member, the member will able to watch a sport channel courtesy of HULU. You can add more widgets to your own network. For many of us looking to built a web base business, these tools are a really affordable tools to make a website attractive. Another example that we study this week is KickApps. You don't really need to spend a lot of money, the services and platforms are already there.