Developing a Social Network

Celebrating Bob

So, it's up. I've been working on creating an on-line social community using Ning. It's my own little experiment into the application of social media. The idea actually popped into my head before my father passed away in March as I riding the bike at the Mansfield Community Center in the early hours of the morning. I would watch the the beautiful sun rises that I was blessed with in those difficult the days, and pondering just about everything. Having launched this blog and and experiencing the the blissful closeness of my family, friends and our larger community of support I wanted to perpetuate that feeling but was sure how. I wasn't a part of facebook or myspace and those are huge networks not intimate and familiar one. So, I researched passively and found Ning. I've been fiddlingly around with it for the past month and contemplating whether to really launch it or not.

My list of reasons not to launch:

1. Nobody gives a crap.
2. Nobody will sign up.
3. The technology will overwhelm my relatives.
4. My mom won't want me to.
5. It'll look bad.
6. I've never done this before.
7. It'll totally flop and I'll look like a fool.
8. People will make fun of me.

My list of reason to launch:

1. It'll be fun.
2. My dad would support the idea.
3. It's just an experiment.
4. I can learn a whole lot just by doing it.
5. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
6. You're already blogging.

So the reasons to launch won over the reasons not to launch. So far, it's going OK. I tested it out with a little focus group. Didn't get much feedback, but we tried out a few of the communication tools and I notices some things I wanted to change.

My first thought was to create an aid to help my family log in to the site. So I began fiddling around with Jing to capture some screen shots. Then my hard drive . . . well if you've been reading the blog you know that story. I really wanted to have something to share with Albert and Mauli but this entailed learning a whole new set of applications and though I'd invested some time in learning them up to this point I really wanted to move on to the next step. Moving on and launching actually unblocked whatever had been stymying me with regard to the learning aids and I finally sorted out the jing, flickr, screencast.com connection and created some good site navigation aids which I have posted in forum/discussion portion of Celebrating Bob. Sometimes you just have to change the order in which you plan do do things to actually get things done.

The site was launched as a private network by invitation only. I dug through my father's contact list, trying to decipher what was a current email address and who the hell people were. That took some major time. I could have simply imported the contact list from Yahoo Mail, but when I fooled around with the import option I discovered that once you had imported and unchecked the people you didn't want to invite it immediately asked for the message you wanted to send and I wasn't sure what I wanted to say at that time. While it's a convenient and time saving too, I wasn't prepared for the immediacy of launching at that moment. So I took the long more arduous road. Some how that's just not shocking. Me use the simpler, easier route -- Ha!

Now it's kind of a sit and wait sort of thing. I've added 30 some-odd members. Totally cool. I'm sure that invites ended up in Junk Mail boxes and that some people went: "WTF is this -- delete" and that others went "Good for you Sarah, but I'm not signing up". As the social network moves forward or stays the same or stagnates, it'll be worth it just for the sheer experience of having built it.

Now I'd better go update my resume!