Joelle Nebbe's Bookmarks tagged social →  View Popular

A swicki is a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice. With
every search, vote and click, your swicki generates more relevant results and
turns into a valuable asset for you and your community. Take a tour to find out
more about how swickis work.





• Choose from text, multimedia or video content
  
• Customize the swicki widget look and feel
  
• Share your swicki widget with your community

• Reliable hosted communities
  
• Powerful administrative tools
  
• Highly customizable
  
• Flexible security options

• Reliable hosted communities
  
• Powerful administrative tools
  
• Highly customizable
  
• Flexible security options

While all of these companies provide social networking functionality, they
differentiate themselves in several ways. AlstraSoft, Blogtronix, Boonex,
Broadband Mechanics, DZOIC, phpFox, PHPizabi, Telligent, Web Scribble Solutions,
and Webligo form the minority that provide non-hosted solutions (although
Blogtronix and Broadband Mechanics provide software as a service, or SaaS,
solutions as well, and others might be willing to locally install their
traditionally hosted platforms).

Some of them, such as Crowd Factory, Prospero, and Neighborhood America
mostly concentrate on serving media companies. Affinity Circles provides
job-oriented social networking solutions for alumni networks and trade
associations. SelectMinds exclusively builds private networks for the employees
of corporations. And Kwiqq aims to become a long-standing technology partner
with the companies it serves.

A few provide unique features not found in your average social network.
Leverage and introNetworks both have strikingly similar visualization features
that enable network members to easily locate other members who share their
backgrounds and interests. DZOIC’s Handshakes Professional product allows
members to save their searches and get notified when new members match search
criteria. ThePort, which has been around since 1999 and focuses on creating
niche communities, differentiates itself by integrating its social networks with
its own news aggregation and start page services.

There are roughly three types of companies that have emerged in the space of
white label social networking. The first provides hosted, do-it-yourself
solutions with which customers can largely point and click their way to a brand
new social network. Companies of this type interact minimally with their
customers and rather focus on providing the network-building tools that they
demand.

We have taken a sample of nine of these companies - Ning, KickApps, CrowdVine, GoingOn, CollectiveX, Me.com, PeopleAggregator,
Haystack, and ONEsite - all of which
provide free baseline services, and reviewed them individually below. We have
also included the chart on the
right summarizing all of these companies’ offerings. Credit for initial
research into these companies goes to Jeremiah Owyang who compiled a comprehensive
list of white label social networking services.

Business Networks work best in industries with lots of buyers and lots of
sellers. This is known as a “fat butterfly” industry structure. If a few buyers
or a few sellers dominate the industry, there is less opportunity for an
information intermediary. This may sound familiar to people who remember B2B 1.0
circa 1999 with over-hyped companies such as VerticalNet. The end goals are the
same in B2B 2.0, but a lot has changed since then:





• B2B users are now online way more than they were in 1999.
  
• Vertical Search is better at creating the common pools of trusted data.
  
• Social networks and ratings have accustomed people to make judgments about
  who they might be interacting with online.
  
• The cost to develop and deploy these types of systems have come down
  dramatically.
  
• Entrepreneurs have figured out how to enable and co-opt intermediaries in
  the supply chain; rather than naively assuming that they serve no purpose and
  will quietly disappear.